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Category: Vision

Ghost Communities

Estimated read time of 5 minutes.

Ghost Kitchens

Ghost communities are on their way due to the innovation of ghost kitchens that emerged through the COVID pandemic.  This concept allows for customers to order food delivery from popular apps like Uber Eats and Grub Hub.  However, rather than having the food prepared in a standard restaurant, brands are learning to cut costs by opening ghost kitchens.

A ghost kitchen allows for the restaurant to utilize less expensive real estate.  Some restaurants will even share this ghost kitchen with other restaurants. They also can be hired to prepare food for other restaurants. 

When I first learned of this concept, I thought this is a genius way for restaurants to save money, become more efficient, and create a whole new dining experience.  I still believe these initial thoughts to be true, but I have started to have some reservations around this concept.

Ghost Warehouse

I recently read an article about grocery chains adopting this same type of model with ghost warehouses.  Many people have now experienced either grocery delivery or at least store pick up of their groceries.  These concepts allow a customer to “shop” for their groceries online and never have to walk into the grocery store.  I know this can be a huge time saver for the busy people in society. 

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As I picture the idea of a ghost warehouse or grocery store, I picture a large warehouse with no windows.  I picture endless shelves of food that doesn’t even have to be displayed well because after all, an employee is the one grabbing the items from the shelf.  I imagine this would look very similar to an Amazon distribution center. The marketing of food companies would have to change entirely.  We will become much more a target of even more digital ads from the food manufacturers for us to add their items to our online shopping cart.

Human Experience

While I see some utility and innovations around these concepts, the thought that rings loud in my mind is that we are killing our communities!  This thought probably is top of mind for me after my recent podcast interview with Doug Griffiths about his book ‘13 Ways to Kill Your Community‘.

Human interactions at the market and sitting to break bread with others are what we as humans have done our entire existence.  Oftentimes it is while sharing a meal that we collaborate and solve problems with colleagues, friends, and family.  It is running into your child’s school teacher at the grocery store that makes your child feel special as they are able to have a one-on-one interaction with their teacher outside of the classroom.  It is the smile that a stranger receives that makes their day and builds just a little more confidence.

Ghost Communities

This idea of turning into ghost communities is exaggerated even more as we hear more talk and adoption of the Metaverse.  Again, I see some great possibilities and potential with this type of technology, but I wonder if we might be overlooking the potential negative side effects.  I am a big fan of cryptocurrency, especially Bitcoin (This is an affiliate link that will award both of us with free Bitcoin when used.) but I am concerned about other applications utilizing the blockchain without having a better understanding of the potential outcomes, positive or negative.

The Metaverse can be a place where the playing field is leveled.  Certain biases can be left behind the screen as users on the inside don’t know much about your real identity.  Disabilities can be overcome in this alternate world.  Race, gender, age are all non-factors in the Metaverse.  These can all be viewed as really positive selling points.

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I would also argue that these identifying qualities are also what make us who we are.  If we are constantly checking and putting aside our true identity, what does that do to our overall mental state?  This question is probably better addressed by a mental health professional.  I foresee this causing big problems in society.

Social Media

I hear many people say that if they could go back in time and do it over again, they never would have joined any social media.  Social media was started or presented as a way to stay connected with others.  Over time we have seen social media lead more to the division of people rather than a unifying force. 

Social media has been attributed to a sharp increase in mental health issues, including depression.  Comparing ourselves to others can lead to damaging self-esteem.  Throughout human history, people have been limited to comparing themselves to others in their tribe or communities.  As the Pandora’s box of social media has been opened wide, we are now pitted against others on a much larger scale.  Social media influencers do a great job of making us feel less than what we should.  Photo filters literally create the image of something that is not even real, yet we still compare ourselves to these artificial attributes of others!

Summary

The point of all of this is to say as a society, we need to be aware of the potential negative consequences of drastically changing our way of life.  We should have discussions in our community, within our families about possible implications and go in eye wide open.  As a chamber of commerce professional, you understand the value of community.  You understand the power in numbers.  Please lead these discussions in your communities.  If nothing else, help others to be aware of what they are getting into before our cities and towns become ghost communities.


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13 Ways to Kill Your Community with Doug Griffiths

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

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

Introduction

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

And now, your host she believes that there are a couple favorite ways to call community. Here’s my dad Brandon Burton.

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

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Diann Rogers 0:47
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Brandon Burton 1:01
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Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Doug Griffiths. Doug, you may recognize as being the author of 13 Ways to Kill Your Community. Doug grew up on a ranch outside of a small community, where that contributed to practical education for him giving a strong work ethic and critical thinking skills. Education, whether he’s learning or teaching has always been an important aspect of his life. After teaching and ranching for several years, Doug successfully served as an elected member of the Legislative Assembly in the province of Alberta for four consecutive terms. In that time, he served in two senior cabinet portfolios as Minister of Municipal Affairs, and Minister of service Alberta, as well as three junior positions in agriculture, finance and Solicitor General. Doug retired from politics in January 2015. to actively pursue his passion of helping communities, organizations and businesses grow stronger in his best selling book 13 Ways to Kill Your Community. Doug identifies challenges and opportunities that all our communities face. The lessons that come from those stories are applicable to all types of communities, whether they’re towns, organizations or businesses. His talents include seeing through the lies, we tell ourselves, overcoming bad attitudes, targeting and focusing tactical planning, communicating with those who are afraid to change and building enduring prosperity for communities. His passion lies and building strong communities. Because within strong communities, leadership can succeed, businesses can prosper and families can find great quality of life.

Doug, I am super excited to have you with me today on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.

Doug Griffiths 3:05
Oh, Brandon, thank you, I am really excited to be on the Chamber Chat Podcast. And I appreciate the invitation. Especially when I get the chance to talk about how valuable and important the role the chambers are going to play in, in moving communities through the past, into the present, and then into the future, it’s going to be so critically instrumental in ensuring the success of communities and I fundamentally believe that building communities is single most important job on earth because as soon as communities are, are successful and prosperous, then families will be able to take care of each other and take care of themselves. So I’m really excited to be here. Something interesting about me, I I don’t know if there’s anything that you haven’t said already, except I will add one thing I was in provincial politics for 13 years for four terms, I resigned on purpose to go back to community building, which is is how I wound up in politics. I tell everybody, if you want in politics, just just keep talking. And if you want out of politics, just just keep talking, talking. Yeah. But you know what, I have been through rehab, I am fully recovered. So I’m I’m good. I’m pretty, pretty blunt and pretty focused on community building. So I’m glad to be here.

Brandon Burton 4:22
Well, I have a 16 year old son who would love to get into politics, I’m going to have to share that advice with him because he just keeps talking all the time. It’s like it’s going to get you in trouble or it’s going to get you somewhere one or the other. Or both or both. Yeah. So I shared a little bit in your bio, but tell us what you do with 13 Ways what kind of services you offer as a company and organization what what is your mission and goal that you hereafter?

About 13 Ways

Doug Griffiths 4:49
Yeah, it’s um, it’s kind of funny because it’s expanded. I mean, when I resigned from politics and the second edition I had finished just after That and released it. And it’s a national bestseller in the US and in Canada. Granted, we need about a 10th of the number of sales to be a best seller here. But it’s people ask me to come and speak and to do the 13 Ways presentation. And so I’ve been all over North America Speaking and then people would call me up after and say, so help us what, what do we do now. And so I would offer up some advice on you know, what I think strategic planning should look like, focusing more on strategy than on operations, because so many strategic plans are generic and watered down, and they’re about operations and there’s no strategy whatsoever in them. So we, we, I brought along a couple of people and our team has grown to five and we have specialists in economic development and chamber issues and communication in modernizing main streets with with designs and socialization in website design, and, and social media and traditional marketing strategies. And we’ve just grown into a pretty exceptional team. And so we, we tend to go into communities and, and assess what their real strengths are, they often think that, you know, what they think are their strengths sometimes aren’t and what they think are their weaknesses can actually become strengths. And then we, we engage people in the community, you know, a lot of public engagement people, you know, gather opinions, but you know, people are busy with their day to day lives. And oftentimes, it’s the the tyranny of the urgent the issue right in front of them they want addressed, and that’s not about what’s what you need to do to be successful 10 years from now. So we plant seeds with people to with new ideas, then we do a strategic plan. And then we do the marketing and communication strategy focused on, on helping people in the community get excited about their potential and, and crafting a real marketing strategy. So they don’t get lost in all the noise and new design websites. And so we sort of do the gamut from, we need help all the way through to we’re, we’re ready to take that first step and actually bring people in.

Brandon Burton 7:00
Awesome. And I think there’s so much value to bring in that perspective from somebody outside of your community, to be able to say, here’s your strengths and weaknesses, and I relate it back to some of the greatest athletes, you know, the Michael Jordan’s and Tiger Woods of the world. They all had coaches, right. I mean, they were the best of the best, but they had they still had coaches who could bring a different perspective and help them see those blind spots are the weaknesses and strengths to help exploit. So I think that’s so key.

Doug Griffiths 7:29
We often get called Community coaches or community therapists, because most consultants come in and they write a report and they leave and for our clients, we tell them once you’ve hired us, we never go away. We’re relentlessly going to advise you and, and give you strategies to make you successful. Because, you know, we we don’t just do this to make money. We do this because we believe in the cause we’ve we’ve adopted.

Brandon Burton 7:54
Yeah, for sure. Well, we’re going to talk more today about the 13 Ways to Kill Your Community. I know a lot of Chamber Champions are familiar with the book, but we’ll have some some more maybe deep dive conversation on that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Topic-13 Ways to Kill Your Community

All right, we are back. And as I mentioned before the break well, we’re talking about 13 Ways to Kill Your Community, your book. And recently, I was invited to join a 13 Ways to Kill Your Community for chambers Facebook page. And that’s how we got connected and kind of one thing led to another and now we’re here talking on the podcast. But um, and I’ll link to that Facebook group too. So if anybody wants to join in and and add their contributions to the discussions, it’s a great place. But what stood out to me as I started reading your book, is you start off with a story or I guess, I mean, it’s a real deal where where you address high school students, and have them kind of project themselves into the future. But you have kind of a unique twist on it. Do you want to share kind of that, that mindset and kind of set the stage for the discussion?

Doug Griffiths 11:22
Yeah, sure. I, we’ve actually had people say that one of the most valuable stories, because the 13 Ways to Kill Your Community, they say then isn’t about community building, it’s about the way we govern and manage our lives. And that’s, that’s where it was born from. So I was a, I was a junior high teacher, before its subs, I made enough money to subsidize my ranching habits, so I could buy more horses and cows. And I would go talk to high school students about how to be successful. And it was, it was a pretty straight up presentation, you know, so, you know, study hard, don’t do drugs, marry someone nice. It’s it’s pretty easy formula, and that the high school students would look at me go, I know, my parents told me that. And everybody’s told me that for for my entire life, I know how to do that. And so when I was done, they’d walk out and say, Thanks, that was wonderful. But nothing really changed. And then I walked into this classroom and had an epiphany right before I was going to do the presentation, instead of talking about how to be successful. I asked them to describe what it would look like, if they ruined their lives. If you failed, that they look down the road, they’re 40 years old, and they have absolutely ruin their lives. Describe it to me. And so their high school students, they would say things like, well, I’d, I’d be a drug addict, I’d write that on the board, I’d wind up in jail, I’d write that on the board, I would fail out of school. So I couldn’t take care of my family, I’d write that on the board, whatever they came up with, I put it on the board. And when they finished with compiling a really robust list, I’d say great, let’s pretend you want to do this. Any one of these things you want to ruin your life. How would you start today? So let’s say you want to be a drug addict? What would you do today to get down start on that path? And I mean, they’re high school students. So they’d hum and haw, and nobody would say anything until one person put up their hand and say, Well, if I wanted to become a drug addict, I’d, I’d smoke a joint after school, and two kids would turn red, because that’s what they did yesterday. And that, you know, they’d also debate well, but alcohol is worse than the marijuana and regardless, they, they started to realize what they were doing that day that would lead them down that path, because I guarantee you, not a single person has ever said, I want to become a drug addict, if you if you meet a drug addict, none of them say hey, this was my lifelong ambition. But somehow, we we get there, we wind up in jail, we wind up marrying somebody we’re not happy with, we wind up doing all sorts of things that ruin our lives. And and it’s because we don’t pay attention to what we’re doing. Now. We wind up trading away what we want most 20 years from now in our lives, for what we want. Now that’s pleasurable, easy and convenient. And it just, I tell that story, because then it struck me that I was working with communities and talking about how to be successful. And they’ll say, Yeah, we know. But they were doing things that were the opposite of what they needed to do to be successful.

Brandon Burton 14:10
Yeah, so that it really helps to apply that same kind of exercise to communities and say, if your goal is to kill your community, where do you start? And then you’ve got these 13 ways. So why don’t we run down real quick, what the 13 ways are, and I’m sure we’ll circle back to certain ones in our discussion, but that way, just to kind of set the table for the discussion what, what are the 13 ways how communities kill or how people kill their communities?

Doug Griffiths 14:39
Well, the number one is, is forget the water. I mean, water is so critical and fundamental to our success. And I’ve I have a lot of I mean, Alberta’s an oil and gas sort of jurisdiction and, and a lot of my former colleagues and I talk and they say, Oh, the economy runs on on oil, and the next World War will be fought over oil. It’s so funny. fundamental to our economy. And I always point out to them, the last World War will be fought over water, because whoever controls water controls everything. I mean, you know, my grandpa always reminded me, you, you can go for three minutes without air three days without water and three weeks without food. And then you die, you can do without just about everything else. But these are so fundamental. And yet we, we sometimes take for granted that we have clean water, or and we get upset when we don’t. And nobody shows up for you know, a ribbon cutting on a new sewer line or a new water line. everyone shows up for the new ribbon cutting on the football arena or, you know, but we don’t show up for those things that are so fundamentally important. And I hear people complain about paying for water, and the prices that they pay. But most people I know pay more than that for cable TV. So it’s, we we forget how fundamentally important it is. So water is the first one attracting business is the second one. The third one is don’t engage youth. And it has the quintessential story about how we do the opposite of what we mean to every strategic plan I’ve seen in a community says engage more youth. Every presentation I do someone says how do we get more young people here? How do we get them to stay here, but but off line, I hear them talking about how there’s no hope and no future in the community and all the young people need to move to the city because there’s no business opportunities and no jobs. And then they sit there and wonder why they leave when all of their conversations chased them away and forced them out of town. deceive yourself is number four. We get into shop elsewhere which I know is popular which is of commerce. It’s chapter five, Chapter Six is don’t paint followed by don’t cooperate in the past. And that’s one of my favorite chapters talking about the the NIMBYs the nopes the bananas, the cave people and the fears all acronyms for different perspectives that that sabotage our our thinking about the future. Nine is seniors that shut them out 10 is reject every new idea 11 out ignore outsiders. 12 is grow complacent. And that’s that’s particularly for communities that are doing well and assume they will always do well, which is not the case. And the last one this chapter 13 Don’t take responsibility. It’s a great way to ensure your community fails is just to turn around and blame other people for

Brandon Burton 17:14
Absolutely, yeah. Excuse me, those, those 13 ways really should be eye openers, I think when you put it in that perspective of here’s how you kill your community. I mean, if you went after it from the perspective of do these things, and you’ll be prosperous and do well, it gets ignored. So

Doug Griffiths 17:33
it does and everyone goes, Yeah, we’re doing that. Exactly. You’re also doing the opposite. And that’s most of us can find success if we just stopped doing the things that sabotage that success.

Brandon Burton 17:44
Exactly. So on this 13 Ways to Kill Your Community Facebook group, for chambers. I posed the question out there. This is the first time I’ve done this for a podcast episode, I actually asked people what questions they would like to have you answer. And I got some some good questions. So we didn’t go any you know, we didn’t do any prep. You and I on this. So I’m just going to ask you some of these questions, have you feel them and circle back to stories out of the book, as you see applicable? But the first one is, what is the biggest thing that chambers get wrong about community development? And their role in it? What what might be that blind spot for for Chambers of Commerce?

Doug Griffiths 18:30
That’s a, that’s a great question. And I may, it’s a big category, because there’s quite a few things that that chambers get wrong, there’s things that all of us get wrong. So I don’t want anyone to think I’m being hypercritical chambers. But so if we’re going to focus on chambers, there are multiple things one, chambers often think that they’re the BL and and all business, and that their role is simply to advocate or lobby for businesses. And and then you get the money sets where you get the perspective that hey, we need to lower taxes to make businesses more profitable and get rid of the regulations. And that becomes the the core the the fundamental issue that chambers deal with. And yet, that might have worked back in the 80s, when when businesses did locate just were that you have the lowest taxes and you had the least number of regulations. But that’s not the way the world works anymore. In fact, back in the 80s, my parents used to move to where the jobs were on parents generation. But now the jobs move to where people want to live. And so economic development is community building successful businesses is community building. Community Building is economic development there there there that you can’t separate them anymore. And so Chambers of Commerce need to also advocate for reasonable taxes and reasonable regulations to make sure that you can create the kind of community that’s called To attract people who want to live there, and then businesses will attract it because you now have a workforce. But I, you know, I see so many chambers just saying oh, are the highest tax jurisdiction and most of the time, that’s a lie. But the impression, I have yet to go to a community where people don’t say, Oh, we’re the highest tax jurisdiction in the entire state of the entire province, everyone believes that, but that can’t be true for everyone. And most cases, it’s not so chambers could help with that. And the other big issue that I think chambers, miss, and again, this isn’t every chamber, but a lot of chambers get so buried in what they think they’re supposed to be doing. They forgot what’s what’s important. So we’ve seen many chambers that charge membership dues to businesses to raise funds, so they can hire someone to put on a big event, so that they can raise enough money to keep paying someone to collect dues, so they can put on a big event and around and around we go. Yeah, and yet, I mean, a lot of businesses, chambers should be helping with some professional development for businesses about about how to make their business more successful, but how to how to ensure that they have quality brick and mortar locations, but also have an online presence so they can grow, showing them how to how to reach out beyond the community with their business practices, but also to fully engage the community so that people want to shop local, that whole mantra, shop local is a is a guilt ridden mantra, that doesn’t work anymore, you’ve got to give people a reason to want to shop local. So those would be a few of the big things that I think chambers miss.

Brandon Burton 21:37
Absolutely. What just struck a chord with me was the, you know, helping the businesses be able to sell brick and mortar but online as well. And reminds me of the chapter shop elsewhere. Right? If you’re not helping your members be able to sell their products online, essentially, people are shopping elsewhere. And that’s going to have effects down the road.

Doug Griffiths 21:59
Yet one of the challenges businesses we hear from businesses, which I mean chambers can help with this is that I don’t have time, I don’t have time to have an online presence. I don’t have time to wash the windows and put up a window display that will attract people in or to beautify the business or to change the aroma or to I don’t have time, except, except it falls right into that old mantra of why does everyone not have time to do it right, but they have time to do it again. If you don’t take time to do it, now you might not be in business, and then you’ll have nothing but time, but it’ll be too late.

Brandon Burton 22:33
That’s right, I’d seen a quote and I wish I could give proper attribution to it. But it is along the lines of if you had the importance of having systems and if you’re too busy to have systems, you’ll always be too busy. So you need to be able to set aside the time to do things right. So one of the the next questions that I wanted to pose to you, as we had mentioned, chambers being having a key role in economic development, community development. So if that’s the role of a chamber is to help develop and help their community progress. How does a chamber get others particularly government entities to take them seriously.

Doug Griffiths 23:19
If we we’ve seen a lot of communities where the the chamber is trying to be progressive that trying to help with beautification downtown and create more advanced to draw businesses downtown. And it falls on deaf ears with the the larger Economic Development Authority or Alliance, so the town or the city or the county or the and my I have the same advice for everyone. Around this. Most of the time, we see our role and we see our job. And we expect other organizations to realize how important we are. Or, or if they don’t we do a presentation to explain why our role is important and how important we are. So it’s like, it’s like we’re lobbying constantly to get attention. And if you want to be successful, stop lobbying, and start building relationships. Because then you can find common ground and you can find common understanding. So I say all the time we see Chambers of Commerce show up with a PowerPoint presentation to explain why businesses are important. Everyone knows businesses are important. We see Chambers of Commerce do a presentation to explain why the Chamber of Commerce is important. Of course they are. But instead find common ground between you in the town. I mean, they’re important to if you want to talk to somebody and build a relationship, you don’t show up and say I’m amazing and I’m important to you because I do this. You the art of conversation is to find common ground to find out what motivates them to find out what interests them, and then define how you can link your common motivations and your common understanding and your common purpose together and build an alliance well that’s that’s what chambers should be doing is So while my advice is always stop thinking you need to show up at Town Council with a presentation. And start with beer and burgers, like honestly start with building relationship in a common understanding. So you know each other’s first names, if you know the names of their kids, and they know the names of your kids, it’s really hard for you to argue, because you start to, to appreciate your human beings. And then when you’ve got common goals about growing the downtown core with new housing and beautification to make the businesses profitable, which increases the tax base as a generates new businesses and new employment. And now you have a common understanding. And you can talk about how you’re going to achieve it together. Instead of saying, Look, I’m important, and you need to do this for me in order for me to be successful, but every organization has 50 people showing up and saying that it starts to fall on deaf ears, because it gets tiring build relationships to distinguish yourself. Right?

Brandon Burton 25:52
I love that advice. As we, in different communities, there may be different initiatives that come up, and a chamber may get behind the idea of you know, a beautification project, or maybe it’s something legislative, that they’re trying to get behind. That’s pro business. And in the book, you talked about the different factions, you know, and you come up to voting, and in you mentioned, specifically the fourth faction, which is the largest, which is those that in the community that are just disengaged, they don’t show up to vote, they don’t pay attention to what’s going on in the community, necessarily. So this next question would be kind of around that, how do we rally the troops to get them engaged? Or how do we get that community buy in? Especially in a world where we see more decline with volunteers and youth joining civic organizations? And how do we reach out to them and make make it a priority for them to be engaged?

Doug Griffiths 26:53
That’s such a big question. There’s so much to unpack. And you’re right, those those. There’s always those factions, those in support of something that was opposed to something and the 95% of people that have no idea what’s going on and don’t care because they’re so busy with the day to day lives, we we’ve lost the art of real communication. I don’t know that it’s it’s a recent loss. It’s it’s been going on for a while, I mean, a lot of communication is got drilled down to press releases, and newsletters and announcements and not a lot of real conversation. And with social media that’s just amped up. Now. Now, you you put out a press release, and 500 other organizations have the same idea and that gets lost in the noise. So my advice always is to go back to the original social network, the word of mouth communication. You want to move people, the majority of people to start to be excited about the future and where you’re going and what you’re doing. You got to have the conversation with them. Again, it’s the same sort of argument with the with the town and chambers build some of those relationships, you’ve got to listen a lot to what what people’s issues are, and and then inspire them about what the potential for the future is so that they know what you’re doing and why. I mean, I can’t I can’t tell you how many communities I’ve seen that decide we’re going to undertake a downtown beautification project. Now they they understand the twinkle lights in the front edge, redoing the front’s and more social activities brings people downtown which makes businesses more profitable. It increases the social center and makes it a hub. And it’s a way to revitalize our downtown’s. And then you hear everyone in the community say, Well, this is this is just fluff. Why are we doing this? Because they don’t understand why there’s good. There’s good research, good, good evidence show that it’s valuable. But we don’t talk to people about it and explain why and then we wonder why they’re opposed. And then that that other faction that’s typically not engaged is easily swayed by the NIMBYs the nopes, the bananas, the cave, people in the fears, those negative people that are constantly critics and and afraid of what everyone’s doing. And and so even when they’re not very inspired still to participate, they’ll sign the petition, they’ll drop in a form letter, email, and suddenly this is wave of opposition. And it’s because we haven’t properly communicated. And so my advice is always reinvigorate the original social network, the face to face communication, you can’t do it once you can’t do it twice, you got to do it a million times, you got to do it forever. And if you ever stop, then the relationship stops. And then you know some of those some of those that can help with the buy in and the excitement and then volunteers understand why instead of just well, I need you to do this. They understand why they’re doing it. They’re connecting it every every good business, every good company has had a vision for the company and every single employee from from the janitor to the CEO, understands what they’re trying to achieve in the vision they have and then they understand their role in helping make that a reality and they want it to be successful. We should be doing that with our communities. That’s why we changed our, we have a different approach for strategic planning. And then we also with the even when we get more volunteers when people buy in, because they really get why we’re doing it. And it’s exciting. And they want to be part of an authentic community, which is only accentuated more since this pandemic, we also have to understand how people volunteer. So I hear way too many people say, Oh, these young people don’t care about their community, and they don’t want to volunteer that’s complete garbage. That is such garbage these, the younger generation, and millennials and the generation Zed Z, are are actually very staunch community builders, they’re very concerned about their communities and where they live. The challenge we have is that they don’t want to volunteer the way older generations did. There’s there’s there’s not one of them that wants to join the elks and show up for a meeting the third Thursday of every month to drink a bunch of beer and go, Yeah, let’s volunteer. They don’t want that commitment. But you give them a project, a gig to work on. And they will volunteer on that project, you know, you’ve got to an environmental cause you got to clean up a park, you’ve got to do something like that, they’ll come, they just don’t want to have to show up the third Thursday of every month at a meeting. And it’s part of the way societies evolve. We live in the gig culture now. And that’s the way they respond. So we got to stop complaining that they don’t want to volunteer and start creating opportunities for them to volunteer in the way they want to volunteer instead of lamenting the fact that don’t do what we’ve done for 40 years. Sorry, I know that was really long.

Brandon Burton 31:27
No, that’s good. I’d like that point that being in a gig culture, and that’s how we engage the youth now is it’s one one gig at a time, right? We got a cleanup project or whatever. And, yeah,

Doug Griffiths 31:39
it’s one of my favorite things. Sorry. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 31:43
I get so excited. This Yeah. If you’re asking for that long term commitment, they kind of glaze over. So I think that’s a great point. Go ahead.

Doug Griffiths 31:51
Oh, to start, because I get so excited about this stuff. I love doing these presentations. But one of my favorite stories was from it was a young man in a community of about 3000 people in the US. And he wanted to clean up one of the local parks, and it was him that wanted to do it. So we went to the town to say, Hey, I’m going to do this, can I do this? Well, the response was, Well, we should get you some garbage bags. And actually, we need to double check and make sure our insurance covers it. Because if you fall and break your leg or crack your head open, we might be insured. Oh, and by the way, maybe we should put a budget to get those garbage bags for you. And then we should actually create a a notice so that other people can come and join. And they had all sorts of issues to deal with. And they said come back in six months, and what will we be approved by them? Well, he looked at them and said, Forget you, I don’t think he used that F word. But when he went to the park with a bunch of his friends, and they cleaned up the park, they took pictures of it before and it wasn’t bad. They just wanted to brighten it up. And they took pictures of it after he got into trouble from the town because he didn’t get permission. But he posted the pictures on Instagram. And 1000s of other young people did the same thing in their community. They said this is a great idea. I think the hashtag was clean like community or clean up my community or clean up my park, something like that 1000s and 1000s of young people from Canada in the United States went into their community and cleaned it up. There was a massive movement. And and yet, not one municipality was responsible for it or instigated, and it just demonstrates that, that these younger generations don’t need permission. They’re not waiting for authority, they don’t give a damn what your title is. They’re used to working in a gig economy in a flat environment. And when they see a cause they want, they’re going to go take care of it. So that makes them some of the most ardent community volunteers we’ve ever seen. And we need to embrace that and find opportunities for them to succeed. Absolutely. I’m

Brandon Burton 33:41
sure there wasn’t one lawsuit either somebody tripping in the park while they’re cleaning up.

Doug Griffiths 33:46
Not one, not one. It was amazing.

Brandon Burton 33:49
Yeah. So if I understand the right word of mouth, Trump’s press releases for those that are disengaged, right. Yeah, imagine Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So the next question that we had is, is the chamber model that we currently have? Is it missing something? Or is it not providing the true needs of the businesses in our community? Yeah,

Doug Griffiths 34:15
definitely. I mean, there’s some modern chambers that are doing some pretty interesting things. But like I said before, this traditional chamber model seems to be collect some funds in membership dues to hire someone to put on an event to raise enough funds to keep that person hired to collect membership dues, and put on an event and round around we go. And yet they’re one of the biggest things I think that’s missing the chamber should be doing is some professional development for their businesses, showing them you know, how to enhance the bricks and mortar, having classes for them to you know, there’s still so many consults going around and you spent $10,000 to get a website designed and if you’re, you got the wrong person, if that’s what it’s costing to design. You should there’s so many Easy Ways to set one up very easily. I’m doing a little training about social media. I mean, there’s there’s a, there’s a business in Williston, North Dakota that was so impressed with Grayson plan you they started off with a, the main street was redesigned and beautified. And then this business opened up and it was very chic. It was very nice. But you can imagine and Willesden, they had smaller client base. But as they continued to sell product, they moved on to Instagram and, and they started posting pictures of their clothes, and clients would then post pictures of them wearing their clothes and built this sort of culture, this unique culture that they owned, and now they get orders from all over the United States and Canada, for the close, they do more of their business on Instagram than they do on Main Street. But they need both. And they would like both, we could use a little professional development for businesses like that. And I think chambers of the organization that can take the lead. And, and so they’ve got to sort of get over the mindset that the businesses are going to tell the chambers to lobby the town and start to think you’re a collective resource to help us grow the business community and make each of us more profitable, and then focus on on some of that professional development too.

Brandon Burton 36:13
I think it’s a great response. Good good fodder for for chambers to listen to and, and figure out how can they continue to stay relevant and and kind of adjust their their business models? This next question that I have is one that I was thinking of as I was reading through the book, and he touched on it some in the book, but I wanted to hear just straight perspective from you in today’s world. What is the importance of community?

Doug Griffiths 36:47
Oh, wow. All right. So we got an hour or so left? Yeah, that’s. Yeah, you know, so we do this, because I think community building is the single most important job on Earth. And I’ve thought that way since since I, when I entered politics back in 2002. And if anything, it’s more true today than it’s ever been. Now, I know being in political circles. A lot of people say families the most important thing. But I’m kind of hesitant about governments or programs to serve families, because families are so different. It’s so diverse. I actually believe if we focus on building communities, then leadership is successful. Businesses are profitable, and families can take care of themselves and each other. So I always encouraged all three levels of government to focus on community building. And that has been everything I had, had lobbied for and argued about for last 20 plus years, has has been proved important through and post pandemic. And it’s because we, we we discovered that if if we were homebound because we were sick that Amazon didn’t send us a note to say hey, are you okay? They sent a note and said, hey, it’s Friday, it’s a good time to shop. That’s it. But I heard, I’ve heard countless stories of now business saying well, you know, they come in every three days, and I haven’t seen them all week. And they’ll call and say, Hey, is everything okay? And they’re there to support each other and help each other. And we’ve we’ve actually seen, we saw the trend before the pandemic. And I’ve argued about this, I’ve I’ve presented the evidence about this people moving from Los Angeles and San Francisco and New York into places like Boise, Idaho, and Des Moines, Iowa and Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Zionsville, Indiana. And so they’re they’re moving to, to communities that are offering a quality of life. And it’s post pandemic or command of this pandemic. Even during the pandemic, people were fleeing to their parents place in small towns or to the cottage country like to get out of the city. And, and this pandemic has made us all aware that we can now work from home, we can do a lot of stuff from home, and that we really want to be in a community that we can where we can go down to the yoga studio, we can go to the brew pub, we can go to the the locally owned coffee shop, we can socialize and talk to each other on Main Street again, recreating that desperately after being locked up for two years. And so it’s demonstrated just how important community is. And it’s also demonstrated that this notion that rural communities, small towns are dying, is no longer true. That’s where people want to be and if we are ready to be to modernize and to provide the quality of life you want. We’re we’re the ones that don’t aren’t stuck with a lot of infrastructure and and sunk costs like the cities are so we can’t rejuvenate as quickly. We can do it very quickly, and they’re looking for us. We just need to make the changes necessary and attract them out there. So, I mean, everything to me has demonstrated, especially in the last few years, just how vital communities are to the human psychology. And I think this is a ripe opportunity. In fact, the next book I’m working on is 13. pathways forward for communities, it’s, you know, it’s about the mindsets and the things that we could do to capitalize on, on what’s coming.

Brandon Burton 40:17
I like that. So I guess the basis for that question about the importance of community in today’s environment is so much is done online. And you’d mentioned Amazon and I just I wanted to give a plug for the the Alberta chambers, I mean, right there in your region, is doing some pretty interesting things with taking things digitally, putting their, you know, the business members online and, and helping set up ecommerce sites and, and doing some of these innovative things. That is building their community. So people can shop online, but still support Alberta and the chambers in that region. So I think there’s a lot of significance still to community, even in the world of technology and, and internet and so forth. In your book, you had mentioned that you’re always looking and observing other ways that people go about community killing their communities. Is there a couple examples that you’ve learned since writing the book that that you’d be ready to share that you’ve learned, of, of way, new ways that you’ve found and are discovered? Yeah, I

Doug Griffiths 41:34
actually, I have a list in a folder on my desk. 13 More Ways to Kill Your Community. Yeah, it’s a long list. It’s it’s amazing how how often people find new ways to sabotage your own success, it’s. So if I was to write another 13 Ways to Kill Your Community, the first chapter would be don’t have conductivity and broadband service. Here in Canada, it’s been declared an essential service that the funding isn’t quite there yet to start to back it up. And we still haven’t even addressed all of our water issues, especially to our First Nations and indigenous communities yet, but I’m confident that we’re going to address that, but but everything the way the world is changing, especially again, post pandemic we can do education is important to the future of our communities and opens all those doors up to attract new people, that it’s as important as water is, and you will die without it. So that would be one of the top ones. The another new one that’s I’ve added to the list since through the pandemic, or over the last few years, is let politics divide you. We’ve seen and it’s it’s across, I think it’s around the whole world. Actually, we’ve seen this notion that, you know, the right is always right, and the left is always wrong, or vice versa. This this polarizing politics, we have got to prevent from infiltrating our community building. Because community is about having people with different opinions and different walks of life and diversity all being together. That’s what makes a community. If if we all agreed, if we all had the exact same mindset, then I mean, it’s not healthy. In fact, there’s been research done on on corporations and boards of directors that all have, this is my quote. But if you have a board of directors that that are all, quote, unquote, qualified, now that you’ve got 10 People who are all the most qualified to run a business, historically, they were 50 year old white males with MBAs. But if you put 1050 year old white males with MBAs in the room, you get one opinion, because they all have the same background, the same experience the same education, you need diversity, to be successful. And it’s the same with communities but, but we’ve got this notion that we we all need to think alike be alike, and anyone who isn’t exactly like us is now the enemy. And that is tearing our communities apart, for the sake of ideology and ideology, I have never found to be right ideas are what are important to help our communities move forward. And so I would, I would say, you know, the chapter two of the next book would be lead ideology where people park rip your community apart.

Brandon Burton 44:22
Yeah, that is powerful. That’s a very real example that we’ve been seeing lately.

Doug Griffiths 44:28
Yeah, and it’s been all over the world. I’m it’s not anyone. It’s not in any particular jurisdiction. But it’s it’s a dangerous precedent. And it’s built on anger. And I anger. You know, I don’t have it in the book, but I say during the presentations. The second most evil of all human traits is envy because it sabotages our own success when we’re envious of others. We need people in the community to be successful. But the most evil of all human traits is anger. And I use the phrase your anger is a liar. It’s a self propagating hatred machine. And he experienced it, you, you go to work hitting potholes and then the front of your car doesn’t, you know, it swears a little bit and you’re angry and you didn’t get the promotion at work and you come home and, and the kids didn’t take the garbage out, you’re like God told you to take the garbage out. And it just continues to feed until it becomes a rage. If you’re in a happy mood, and you come home and you see the kids didn’t take the garbage out, you’re like, come on, I asked you to try and remember, the angry you are, the more angry you look to become. And our anger is ripping our communities apart. And it’s being fed by politics, and we’ve got to get around it. Or we’re gonna sabotage your own success.

Brandon Burton 45:40
Yeah. Well, I hope you do come out with that book. It’s 13 More ways, your community. As we start wrapping things up here, I wanted to ask if you’ve been very generous with time and, and knowledge and insight, but what might be one tip or action item that you would suggest for Chamber Champion to do to help lift their community to the next level?

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Doug Griffiths 46:04
Well, I mean, start the conversation about what the future can be and make sure the conversation is positive. Now we can we can always cite, you know, what’s wrong, oh, our main streets are ugly, or our, our town doesn’t work with us or taxes are too high, start with with something positive, and help educate people. And so my advice, the very first bit of advice I always give to chambers of commerce, is have a session on customer service. Because I’ve been to lots of small towns that go into the businesses and they look at me like, who are you? And what are you doing here? Yay, for customer service, me, every single person you connect within a community is a reflection of that community. So all it takes is the very first person to be unfriendly or look grumpy, or look like they’re there. They’re not You’re not welcome. And man, the impression of the is that the whole town is like that. It’s so customer service, whether you’re going into the town office, or going into a business, it doesn’t take a lot to smile and say, Hey, welcome. This is great. And then, you know, there’s so many ways to improve that customer service. And it’s funny, the mean, evidence, psychological research shows that if we smile, even when we don’t feel like smiling, we eventually feel like smiling, it put it changes our mood, if you walk around with a scowl, you get angry, or if you walk around with a smile, even if you don’t mean it, eventually it becomes a real smile. So just just realizing and helping the businesses realize that when a new person from out of town shows up on Main Street, that first impression is everything. Because it changes the tone changes, the brand changes a story into something positive instead of in something negative. And so my advice is, is that talk about how you can, you can sell your community with a smile.

Brandon Burton 47:59
I love that tip. And in fact, in today’s world, where we’ve have become more digital and chambers have been used to doing, you know, hybrid events and doing things over zoom, and they’ve dove in to the digital part of things, I would maybe take it a step further and do this educational series or, or training or whatever you want to call it on customer service that recorded and you have created a library of things like this. So your employers in your community, as they onboard new employees, five years down the road, 10 years down the road, they can access these trainings on customer service, because some of those things are, you know, they’re always applicable. And it continues to show the relevance for the chamber. It puts a good face on your community, it creates a stronger business there, it’s just a win win all the way around. But I would encourage chambers to capture that and create a library that can be shared amongst the businesses in your community.

Doug Griffiths 49:00
Brilliant, because it’s a good reminder after a year or two to watch, even if you’ve watched it once already a good reminder that customer service. No, that’s brilliant. Absolutely.

Brandon Burton 49:08
So I like asking everybody I have on the show this question. As we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Doug Griffiths 49:21
Well, I think changing that that old world story, that same pattern of behavior, same pattern of operations is is what needs to change. And but anyone who thinks that chambers are defunct and that they’re going to fade away, doesn’t understand the value of chambers. What’s going to go away is the old way of operating and chambers that are going to be successful that are going to provide value for that that membership do that are going to provide value for the council that needs the advice on what businesses are looking for not just the lowest taxes on these regulations, but actually Bringing socialization downtown and Beautification and helping ensure that their prospers, that’s the future and chambers are going to have no problem being successful. If they’re prepared to adapt, just like every other organization, and every other business, adapt or die.

Brandon Burton 50:17
That’s right. And go back and read this book. And if you want to kill your chamber, there’s a course out here for you to do. There’s a bat for you to follow. Madang I have really enjoyed our conversation and having you here with me on Chamber Chat Podcast today, I want to give you an opportunity to share any contact information or ways for people to connect, if they have any questions about what we talked about today. Or if they wanted to connect with you about their community and the services you offer, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you.

Connect with Doug Griffiths

Doug Griffiths 50:51
So my email is Doug@13ways.ca or.com. We have both now. And that’s 13ways.ca or.com. And there’s my cell number two, I always advise people and you’ll hear if you call me. I say please don’t leave a message, you’re better to text me and say, Hey, here’s my name. Here’s where I’m from, quit schedule a time to chat, and then I can text you back. And otherwise you leave a voicemail. And then I have to stop what I’m doing and call in and write it down on a piece of paper and I’ll put it away in my pants and then watch them and I’ll forget you’ll think I’m a jerk because in callback, so text on my cell 587-335-0013. And of course, you can always look up 13 Ways on on Instagram On Facebook, check out our website 13ways.ca or.com where we have a lot of we have free master classes on strategic planning on marketing and communications. And and so check it all out. We also have a a community leaders camp coming up in the beautiful rocky mountains at the end of April. And we have a few spots left. It’s going to be intimate, there’s only going to be about 50 people with some amazing keynote speakers. Obviously, you can check out that information. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for, then just reach out because odds are if you need it, and we haven’t created it yet to help. There’s 1000 Other people needed to and so we’ll get to work on it. So I reached out.

Brandon Burton 52:21
Absolutely, I’ll get all that contact information in our show notes for this episode, which will be found at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode164. But Doug, this has been a real treat to have you on the podcast. And I really appreciate you sharing your time with us today and sharing these key insights as well. Thanks a lot.

Doug Griffiths 52:42
Thanks, Brandon. I really appreciate the work you’re doing to with helping Chambers was so critical of an element to building communities. I just can’t thank you enough. Keep up the great work.

Brandon Burton 52:52
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Industry Trends with Joe Henning

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

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

Introduction

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

Voiceover Talent 0:14
And now, your host. He loves hearing stories of listeners connecting with his podcast guests. He’s my dad, Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton 0:21
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast . I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Diann Rogers, President and CEO of the Rancho Cordova Area Chamber to learn how the Holman Brothers has provided value for her.

Diann Rogers 0:46
As a medium sized chamber, we recognize that it’s absolutely critical to have a well qualified and well trained membership development person. Holman Brothers trained that person recruited that person then they even trained me on how to manage that person. We’re grateful for the support we got.

Brandon Burton 1:01
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting HolmanBros.com.

Doug & Bill Holman know how to diagnose and solve
member recruiting issues faster and better than anyone else, and they want to put
that knowledge to work for you and your chamber. Learn more at HolmanBros.com.

Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Joe Henning is Joe is served as the president and CEO of the Henry County Chamber of Commerce in Georgia since 2019. Prior to that, he served 14 years as president and CEO of the aurora Regional Chamber in Illinois. Joe is a 2009 IOM graduate he holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Public Relations and a master’s degree focused on organizational development from Northern Illinois University, as well as a certificate in nonprofit not for profit management from the University of Illinois, Chicago. He has served as chair of the Midwest Board of Regents in 2012 and 2013. In 2017, he served as chair of the National Board of Trustees for the program and continues to serve as a faculty member. He has taught on collaboration, industry forecasts strong chambers for the future, and marketing and membership in 2007. Under Joe’s leadership, the Aurora chamber received its first accreditation through the US Chamber of Commerce with four star distinction. In 2012, and 2017, he led the reaccreditation efforts and successfully achieved consecutive five star distinction. In 2015, the Chamber received chamber the year from the Illinois Association of Chamber of Commerce executives, as well as three star chamber of valor by Hiring Our Heroes, US Chamber of Commerce Foundation. In 2014, he was named chamber Executive of the Year by the Illinois Association of Chamber of Commerce executives, Joe supports and serves on the boards of a number of organizations that impact equity, inclusion, mental health, among others. I’m excited to have Joe with me today on the podcast, Joe, if you take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions that are listening and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little bit better.

Something Interesting About Joe

Joe Henning 3:11
Well, thank you, Brandon, I appreciate it. I look forward to the conversation today. And I’ve been most appreciative of your podcasts and the insights that they give with all the peers. As you said, I’m a native of Illinois, I born and raised there and about two years ago, moved down here to Georgia. And so right now, I’m having a little difficult time, loving my Chicago Cubs and what they did with the bloodletting this year, but especially living in Atlanta, Braves country after the World Series wins. So thank you for your time today. Appreciate it.

Brandon Burton 3:47
Absolutely. It’s a pleasure. Before we get into our discussion today, I’d like for you to sit to take a few moments just to share with us a little bit about the Henry County Chamber, kind of the size, scope, staff budget, just kind of give us some perspective before we get into our topic.

About the Henry County Chamber

Joe Henning 4:03
Sure. So excuse me, so I’m Henry County Chamber. It’s a little bit larger than I had. When I served in Aurora. We’ve got about 800 members. We do have the dual role as Chamber of Commerce and the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau for Henry County. There are four cities within Henry County we have about a I think we’re things that last census, we were pushing the 300,000 mark, maybe just a little bit over that. And what we’ve seen and this occurred prior to my coming here, but round 20 around 2000 or so. The population just exploded in Henry County. We’re just slightly south of Atlanta, about 30 minutes south of Atlanta, and the population exploded and that diversity that came with it is something that we’re still addressing, working with and supporting change management within that realm. So we’ve got, we’ve got kind of a southern hospitality, but we’ve also got that Atlanta metro feel to it. And so I think we’re all trying to figure out what that looks like for each one of us individually for businesses, for organizations, and that. So we’ve got about I’m sorry, we’ve got about seven employees full time employees on staff split between that tourism and the chamber. And I’m looking forward to the conversation today, kind of the lessons I’ve learned. And hopefully, as people follow the your podcast and hear this, maybe they’ll be able to share a couple lessons that they’ve learned too. And I always appreciate these programs, because I get something out of it as well.

Brandon Burton 5:39
Absolutely. Which our topic for discussion today is going to be around industry trends as we kind of look forward into the future some, and I appreciate you mentioning, you know, for listeners that hopefully they can provide some feedback as well. I recently started a Facebook group, chamber chat champions. So that is a place where we can kind of park some of these episodes. So after people listen to them, get on there and share some of your ideas. What are some of your thoughts going forward with industry trends? Let’s, you know, get some more discussion going around these episodes, make it a little bit more interactive, and said, well, we’ll jump into this discussion around industry trends as soon as I get back from this quick break.

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Topic-Industry Trends

Alright, Joe, we are back. So as we look at the Chamber industry trends going forward, what are some of those things that are kind of top of mind for you that other chamber executives, other chamber professionals should be mindful of at least going forward?

Joe Henning 8:49
Well, I I’d like to, I’d like to take us back, it’s probably it’s probably been at least five years. And the ACCE, he put out their Horizon Report. And I believe at the time that they first launched it, there were eight influences. And then right after that, within about a year, they added the ninth one with limitations of government. And if nothing else, between the political and social fragmentation and the population shifts and the resources, and all of that, those nine areas that they identified. If nothing else in the last two years as a chamber leader, we’ve realized is that it was spot on. Like they knew what we were talking about, right? Everything that came to the global impact, the scarcity and abundance, all of these different pieces that they were looking at that were influencing the way we would be. And what they figured was 2025 hit us about five years early. And so, you know, as we look at that, I think one of the key takeaways is that people haven’t read that report and really looked at what those influences have, can do for their organization. They really need to check that And ASAP has a similar a similar identity that they’ve done for associations in general. And kind of, I’ve used them both in in teaching industry trends and chambers and associations in the future. But it really does help to go back and look at that. And what we’ve done in the past is group work, whether it’s a committee, you know, maybe it’s the ambassadors or as our Government Affairs Committee, is we’ve taken one of those nine influences and really dissected it down and said, Okay, if we’re looking at population shift, what does that mean? And for us, that’s become an abundance. Like I said, we’ve doubled our population within the last 30 years. And so we have an abundance of population. And with that shift, that changing demographic, what does that do for our community? And what do we need to do in order to embrace that support that that growth? So I think really looking at the influences over the last year, I think any any of us within the chamber world can can identify where those influences have impacted us with COVID pandemic. You know, its its impact on education. You know, we’ve got a one hand we’re sitting here in Henry County, I believe, at the end of October, we had a 2.6 unemployment, right. But that’s not taking into account those that have left the workforce. And so I still have businesses here that are struggling to hire, you know, they might, they might normally run three shifts, but they’ve only got enough employees that they can do two shifts. And so that impact on the local economy and the whole state’s economy is an issue that we have to address and figure out how we get that workforce back.

Brandon Burton 11:37
Yeah, there almost needs to be a different metric beyond Yes, sir. appointment, because it’s not showing what the true yeah, issue. Yeah, it’s,

Joe Henning 11:45
it’s truly a dated metric, when you think about it, when you think about how its measured, and why they chose that. It’s definitely a dated metric.

Brandon Burton 11:52
Absolutely. So as we are looking at the future of chambers, I mean, I think that’s spot on. If somebody is not familiar with the horizon, report, by ACC, to, to go download it, read through it, and be very familiar with it. And you’ll see a lot of things. It’s like, oh, yeah, this has happened.

Joe Henning 12:11
Oh, yeah. But there’s really,

Brandon Burton 12:16
but there still is useful information that is going to be very relevant to making sure your chamber is up on the trends and, and being insightful as to what the future has to offer. And if anything, I would say in the age of technology we’re in, it just speeds up the change. So you mentioned that these changes coming five years earlier, I think it has a lot to do with that. But

Joe Henning 12:38
it does, you know, one of those areas was that communicate the Communications and Technology. And I think if we weathered it successfully, we all realize that the only way we were going to be able to communicate with our members and our community was through technology, we weren’t going to be able to do we couldn’t do face to face for a number of months. And we couldn’t do the networking. And believe me, I am so glad that we were able to put that aside because you know, anybody that does a survey, networking is always at the top of the member wanted member need. And yet you get the same small group that shows up every month for the networking events. And so I think for all of us that were able to put that on the side burner, and really focus on being a resource for our businesses, whether they were members or not, you know, to be that resource to be relevant and essential to their success. I think that was the best opportunity, we all had to prove that we were more than just a networking organization, that that’s not what we were solely put here for that we had other things that we could provide to them. And that we were successful in doing that. And so when I look back at 2020, Brandon, as much of a struggle as it was for all of us, I still think it was a great opportunity for Chamber of Commerce to really prove its worth.

Brandon Burton 13:58
Absolutely, it really shined the spotlight on what chambers do. And the reason they’re there. And you know, I don’t know. I mean, networking obviously has a purpose. I mean, there’s a reason people ask for it. There’s a reason chambers do it. But it also becomes a it’s not a high demand task oriented thing for chamber to do. It’s relatively simple, provide a venue some drinks some reason to get together, right? Where it can be done on another level, you know, where it’s much more carefully curated and inviting certain people the network with a purpose and really having a reason instead of just coming and pitching what you have to sell to other people. You

Joe Henning 14:44
know, I think that’s exactly I think what I’ve tried to do over the last year or so is really speak to that activity as connections. And I know that also can can kind of be overused in that but but what I want them to realize Yes, we’re doing these, these opportunities for you to expand your network. But let’s make connections, you know, know who you’re looking to meet, let one of my teammates know who it is what it is you’re looking for. And when can we create those connections, whether it’s in person at an event, or via email, or phone call, or something like that. Because you know, you can have, you can take 50 business cards home from a networking event, you’re probably not going to connect with them, you’re not going to follow up with half of them. It looks good when you can stack them there. And you feel like you were successful, because you met 50 new people. But was that a better use of your time, or you you telling me that, hey, I need to, you know, I’m a realtor, I really need to know, the mortgage people that are in the membership I really need. That’s where my, that’s where my bread and butter is. So let me help make the connection with those 1012 1515 mortgage lenders, so you know, who you can reach out to, because, you know, you might need if you’re a realtor, you might need the plumbing expert at some point, if you’re trying to get a house up to market. But the rest of them, you know, you’re, it’s a waste of your time. And that’s, and that’s where I feel sometimes we we do what we’ve always done. And this this last couple of years was really an opportunity for us to evaluate what it was we were doing, and how do we move things forward. And I think that’s where so many chambers of commerce were able to prove their worth, and prove their relevance. And I think that’s what many of us have always struggled with, because everybody sees us, you know, stodgy, you know, politically connected, you know, really only looking out for the employer. You know, we were not I mean, we spent last year, we worked with one of the cities to give away $1.3 million to small businesses so that they could stay open, and they could keep their families under a roof. We worked with a lot of our health care providers to make sure that the COVID Panda COVID vaccine was out and people were getting it and that we could keep businesses open restaurants open. But keep the schools open, too, because we were seeing that struggle. So I mean, there’s still things that we’re dealing with, we’re dealing with early childhood care, you know, that’s something that we kind of saw 510 years ago was needed. But boy, did that pandemic open a lot of people’s eyes, yes, it really was a problem. And so now we’re kind of looking at that as how do we how can we help facilitate some change within that as well?

Brandon Burton 17:24
Absolutely. So what are some of these ways? I mean, we, we probably don’t need to get super deep into it. But the ways that chambers have shown the relevance, I mean, we’re beyond the networking, we’re beyond, you know, the the Staci, you know, the the well connected organization, but it really is about building a stronger community.

Joe Henning 17:46
Yeah, you know, you asked about Henry County, and I guess I didn’t think about it at the time. But, you know, we’re fortunate, we have a great and this started, this started literally, probably three months before the pandemic, it was like, right around January, maybe a little bit earlier than that, but but the school superintendent, the county manager, the executive director of our development authority, and myself sat down and started figuring out ways that we could work together. Then the pandemic hit within about three months. And fortunately, we had those relationships. So we knew who could take the lead on what and so we we went, and we started scheduling, virtual town halls, through zoom, Facebook Live. And because we had the trust in the relationship with those other three organizations, the four of us appeared together and talked about the pandemic and what that meant for education and what that meant for employers. You know, how the county was reacting to it. And so we were able to be that, that, that resource of knowledge for them and share that information, because we had already built that trust. And I think that’s where many chambers were able to succeed in the last couple of years was they started building that trust, they had that trust in place, or they were able to quickly get that trust together and look at how they could support the community as a whole. And I think what I saw from many of them was traditionally because when you look at it, what pays our bills is our members. So we do have to focus on those those members and what their needs are. But those that were really successful, still cared about the members, but they opened up their doors to all businesses, because they realized that we needed all businesses in order to keep our local economy strong. And so what many saw was a growth in their in their membership. Because once it once it turned around and those non members that you’d helped were coming in. But I think we also we also learned a lot about technology. You know, we were good at texting and emails and everything. But we went remote for about I think it was about three months that that we had closed Our office and we had one employee at a time in the office. And so we had to start communicating as a team via zoom. And so every day at 1030, I called a staff meeting unless you had the day off, you had to be on it. I wanted to see eyeball to eyeball the day that my team was doing, okay. But I also know that we still needed to bounce ideas around and get stuff done. And so that worked really well. So the technology, you know, we were looking at it, we were looking at how do we do webinars and things like that this forced our hand. And I think there were many chambers that really found that. And I think we’ve all found our success in that as well. We had talked a little bit I think, earlier in the podcasts, or maybe just before we started about timing, and kind of that evergreen aspect of it. And it was really interesting, when we would put one of our webinars out, we were really pleased with the numbers we had when we looked about two months later, they’ve more than doubled and sometimes tripled in viewers. And so that made us realize that it’s great that we’re doing these in person events where we can allow for the networking, and we can share the knowledge. But we’re missing so many people, you know, we’re missing are restaurant owners in that that have just closed and they’re not coming in for breakfast, because they’re in bad. You know, we realized that we need to figure out what that hybrid now looks like. And so that’s kind of what we’re looking at for 22 is how do we take that that technology that we’ve embraced, and bring it back to the in person opportunities for people to connect? And so I think that’s what 22 is going to be for us?

Brandon Burton 21:29
Yeah, I can see, you know, in the future, some chambers now, you know, as they start opening back up to more in person things again, but having a camera setup, and capturing, you know, everything going on, and then having a database of resources, and so on almost an on demand library, and repurposing it through social media and YouTube and podcasts and all these different ways. Because, you know, the way that the restaurant owner versus the insurance agent versus you know, the the retail shop owner, the way they digest the information is going to be so different. And you almost got to be there in every different way to be able to That’s right. That’s what we’re fighting. Yeah. Which, yeah, we all love to hear that. Right. Just creative work.

Joe Henning 22:13
You know, I think I think that’s the key, though, is we? We, you know, like I said, we do a lot of the networking, because that’s what’s expected. And I think if we can create opportunities for people to see, oh, you know what, I’d rather do this than just the networking. And we start really prioritizing what it is that we do and what that value add is. I think that’s how we can change what our business model looks like. And I think that’s what the future is for the chamber is, is it’s time for us to change. And this is going to help force our hand to do it.

Brandon Burton 22:42
Yeah, absolutely. So what are what are some of these other trends? Maybe that you see, I know. Yeah, diversity, equity. Inclusion is one that that I noticed. I don’t know if there’s others, you want to make sure that we highlight as we go about our discussion.

Joe Henning 23:02
You know, we talked a little bit about the political and social fragmentation. We, we realized a lot of that in Georgia, between Brunswick and Atlanta, you know, during the pandemic, and we, we had nothing as severe here in Henry County, but we did have some some conflict, for lack of a better word, I guess. And so you’ve got that fragmentation. And we took the technology, and we started doing community dialogues. And we had to do it virtually because you couldn’t be in person, but we were having success with our community dialogues, and really having the conversation around equity and diversity and inclusion. And from there, you know, it’s interesting, from there, we were able to, we’ve actually got a five part series that we put together for hospitality. And it’s called culture of customer service. And it’s looking at the needs and wants of our African American visitors, our Hispanic visitors, our Asian visitors, our LGBTQ visitors, and those with disabilities. And so we really looked at the diversity within the DEI, and put that out there for hospitality. And we’ve gained some great traction and interest with that, in fact, we’ve got non hospitality, businesses that are interested in providing that for their employees. So I think when we look at that fragmentation, we need to figure out as a community leader, you know, how do we address it, it might not be the same in every community across the country. But you know, we’re all kind of struggling. I think if we’ve got peers out there that have worked with it, I think that’s an opportunity for us to align with that. And then I think the last one, you know, because I know that we’re getting close to your 30 minute mark, but I think one of the lessons we look at is that resource alignment. And, you know, as I said, there’s a lot of things that we do because we’ve always done but that eats up resources. And like you said, we’re just you know, we’re Doing everything we need to really look at what we do well, and what we do, because it’s needed to be done. And so looking at those resources we have, and really applying them to what our mission as a chamber is. And there’s, you know, it’s said that if you’ve seen one chamber, you’ve seen one chamber. It’s not gonna that alignment is not going to be the same for everybody. But you got to go back and look at mission of your organization. And, you know, our priorities, our leadership development, business success, advocacy. So that’s where we put the largest amounts of our resources in. It might be financial, it might be human capital. But we really look at what those four areas of our mission are. And that’s where those resources go.

Brandon Burton 25:40
So this thought or question is kind of a combination on these last two points that you you hit on with the community dialogues you did, Randy and I, and then the the resource alignment. So I know, during 2020, we all got hit really hard with the the idea that we we all need to pay more attention to diversity, equity inclusion. It was a hot topic. And it was right for chambers to put a focus on that shine more light on it. At the same time, well, let me let me finish that. So So you shine more light, you guys are the community dialogues, which is awesome. I think if you didn’t strike when that iron was hot, and say you just now got around to doing the community dialogues, may not have the same impact that it did when you first rolled it out. So I think being able to quit, act quickly and pivot when you see that need. So I guess my question would be how would you approach the time when it’s right to make that quick pivot versus chasing the shiny objects and the squirrels is distress?

Joe Henning 26:47
Good understood, I think there’s still an opportunity, if there is a need that you’ve identified within your community, by all means have that conversation. Interestingly enough, our first dialogue was late June. And we started with Malcolm Gladwell, talking with strangers. And if anybody isn’t aware of that is his book about Sandra Bland death in Texas. At that she was from Chicago area, she was moving down there for a job and that and she, I believe it was she was in she was found in a cell. Excuse me. Um, strangely, I don’t know how, you know, I don’t know, sometimes you just lucked into success. And, excuse me, this was the five year anniversary of this occurrence. So we were able to use that. But we also took advantage of having great relationships with our police department and our faith based leaders. And so we had a, we had a conversation with a police officer, a faith based leader, and our chamber chair, and really looked at the different pieces that each of them brought to the conversation around the Sandra Bland death. Excuse me. And so, you know, we kind of looked at that as when we were programming, we wanted to make sure we had key individuals that took part in that conversation, because we were doing it virtually, um, it was a little more difficult to get a true community dialogue. But I think if you’re doing it now, you might have that opportunity that you can have the community dialogue. And so if I were to do it today, without the experience, I’d still look at starting with conversations around some of these books that are out there. And there are many, depending on what it is you want to address, we started with the race relations, because that’s where we were struggling in Georgia and in the southeast. But you’ve got others on other disabilities, LGBT, you know, you can look it up, there’s definitely, you know, an area each month that you can focus on, I would do it in an auditorium or a church and you can still have your panel up in front. But you also have then the opportunity that your community that’s, that’s joined you there that day can also ask questions, and so it does become more of that dialogue. So I think there are ways that we could still do this, if people haven’t done it yet. You know, they’re still waiting, there’s still a way that they can impact their community positively.

Brandon Burton 29:24
So in I mean, that’s that’s one example right around the DNI but it will say technology in there, you know, yeah, a new social media platform rolls out and you got to strike while the iron Todd or else he missed the boat and, you know, being able to weigh out, you know, does this really serve our members? Is it really served the mission of the chamber, or is this just the next shiny object and it’s gonna be gone? Yeah,

Joe Henning 29:50
no, I absolutely agree. Like I I, you know, if I could get out of social media, I would, but I think I think for any of us in the industry, you have to use that as a Pulse Point. And there’s a lot that you can find out about what’s going on within your community by looking at what’s what’s happening within that social media context. And whether it’s Facebook or Tik Tok, I mean, it’s Facebook or Twitter, I refuse tick tock, it’s just too annoying for me, I must just, I’m probably aging out. Um, but, you know, I try to limit when I get in there. So I don’t end up down too many rabbit holes. But you do start seeing where people are weighing in on things. And whether it’s, you know, the the limitations of your government, whether it’s locally or at the state level, or even at the federal level? If that’s a concern, then what can you do as an organization as a community leader, to help affect change there? You know, is it a conversation with one of your elected officials, we did that during our 40 day session last year, we couldn’t get to the Capitol because of the pandemic. And so, each Wednesday, I think it was about three o’clock in the afternoon, we took turns inviting each one of our elected officials, our State House State Senate, in for about a half hour conversation on what was happening that week, where they thought certain key legislation that we were interested in was was a dying wasn’t going further. And so it really helped us then to show that role that the Chamber plays in advocating for business. And so sometimes you just look into these successes. And, you know, I think you just have to be open to try and get it. Believe me, I, we laughed earlier when we started. But we’ve had some failures. I mean, we started some of these, these programs. And, you know, I pause it because we were a little bit early, and then I forget to turn the recording back on. And, you know, those things happen. And a lot of times, it’s happened to your guests, so they understand to that, oh, we’re gonna do that again. But you just have to go with it. It’s it is a little bit of a discomfort level that that learning curve you got, but I think it just makes us stronger. It makes our organization stronger. It gives us more tools that we can reach the business community in the community as a whole, so that we can do our service to what we’re here for.

Brandon Burton 32:12
Yeah, absolutely. Well, as we do start to wrap things up here, I wanted to see if you have any, maybe a tip or an action item that you would recommend to a chamber listening that they can do to help elevate their chamber up to the next level?

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Joe Henning 32:26
That’s that’s a great question. I think. I think just to take it down to the basic, I challenged them all to do, you know, as a professional within the chamber industry, commit yourself to one goal of professional development in 2022. You know, it can be if you haven’t, if you haven’t looked into Institute for organization management with the US Chamber Foundation, look into it, it’s a four year program, but my goodness, the information you get out of it, the relationships that you creates, are amazing. And for me, that’s my sounding board, when I get stuck with something or I get frustrated or don’t even know where to turn is I go back to some of my peers from my classes or on some of those boards that I served on with them. And we kind of walk through what that is to learn. It could be you know, they’re listening to your podcast, that’s great. That’s professional development, they’re learning from, you know, these these outside of mind these great minds that are out there in the country leading a chamber of commerce, and it’s helping give them ideas. But I think, don’t be afraid to learn and make sure you’re committed to that go after your CCE or your ca IE, look at your state accreditation things. But the only way we have to treat this as a profession. And I think sometimes we’ve been lost with that. And we’ve seen some people that have come and gone that might not have thought it was a profession. But if we’re here for the long haul, and I think going on about 20 years now I consider that a long haul for me. Um, we have to look at it as a professional look at what that professional development looks like. And so I challenge people just kind of keep learning it. If nothing else we learned from the last two years is we have to stay on top of the trends, the knowledge that’s out there, what it is that we can do to better serve our members in our organizations, because we’re all in it together. And we’re here as parents, we’re here to help each other. And I can’t thank you enough for being one of those resources out there for the chamber for fashion and helping all of us to see where those resources and those ideas are.

Brandon Burton 34:37
Thank you. It’s my pleasure. I think it is such a important aspect to continue that professional development wherever you find it. You know, especially everything you listed, I think, you know, having a good mentor having a group of people you can go to and bounce some ideas off of. And these are things that have been shared in other episodes as well and it’s Stay, I’d love having that reinforcement. Oh, somebody, inevitably it’s happened or somebody that that’s where I need to reach out to so and so and, and they don’t do it because they’re busy, they get caught up. And then this is that reminder, go reach out to that person, that group that whatever it is to further your professional development, do it now make a note?

Joe Henning 35:21
That’s right. I think a lot of times we don’t do it, because we’re like, oh, it’s, it’s gonna interrupt what they’re doing. It’s gonna be an inconvenience to them. They’re gonna think I want something. And I’ll tell you what, when I’ve made those calls to thank people, or to see how they’re doing, or I’ve received those calls, it’s made both of our days, right, even somebody’s thinking about me, somebody cares. And I think that’s especially, you know, especially right now, and I hate to keep beating this pandemic. But that’s all we all want. We just want to know that there’s somebody out there.

Brandon Burton 35:51
That’s a fair point. Yeah. But so we’ve been talking all about industry trends. And I like asking this specific question to everyone I have on the show is, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Joe Henning 36:08
I think they’re, you know, there’s always going to be a need. I think the challenge we all have, as chamber professionals, is moving from a relevancy standpoint. And we all proved it, in the last two years that we were relevant, we were needed to being essential, and providing services that they can’t find somewhere else, or that we do so much better that nobody else can do it. And so I think that’s where we’re all heading. I couldn’t tell you, you know, I thought, I thought maybe we wouldn’t be a brick and mortar, because we did well enough. But you know, we also have the Visitors Bureau within our, our organization, so we’d still need to have something like that. But, you know, I think a lot of people are looking at what that space looks like, do they really need that large footprint? Or is it a smaller footprint that they can use and so I think we’re gonna see a lot of changes, I think we’ll see some some mergers, I think some of the smaller chambers might merge or might merge with another entity, whether it’s a Convention and Visitor’s Bureau or an Economic Development Authority. But we’re still going to be here, as long as we’re doing our job. And committing to it as a profession, I think we’re still going to see the need for chambers, they’ve been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. So as long as we keep picking up that challenge, and going forward, I think we’ll be here.

Brandon Burton 37:23
Absolutely. Move from relevant to essential. And I’ll put in a plug for Casey Steinbacher, with her essential, great, great read and really helps to look forward as to what chambers can do to become more essential. But, Joe, I’ve enjoyed this discussion today. And for having you here on the podcast with me, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information if if someone wanted to broaden their professional network or learn more about how you’re doing things, what would be the best way to reach out and connect with you.

Connect with Joe Henning

Joe Henning 37:56
Thank you, that’s great. I my contact information, I think the easiest is probably just go to Henrycounty.com. That’s the website, you’ll find my my ugly mug right there on the homepage, and click on that and get my email address (jhenning@henrycounty.com) and phone number (770. 957.5786). And if you are interested in seeing what we did with those community dialogues on that, search Henry Georgia Chamber on YouTube, and all of those dialogues, let’s video dialogues are up there. And they’re also on our Facebook page for Henry County, chamber, Georgia. And if you have questions on you know, if you want to know what we learned through that process as we improved it, by all means, reach out to me and my team and and I honestly, credit I’m looking forward to I am in that chamber champion chat that you have in Facebook. And so I’m looking forward to learning from others too, as they give us feedback on today’s podcast.

Brandon Burton 38:48
Awesome. I appreciate that. I will I’ll get your contact information in our show notes for this episode. It’ll be a chamberchatpodcast.com/episode159 and I’ll try to link the YouTube video or at least your YouTube channel in there. So people are gonna, you know, browse around and find those community dialogues that you reference when this has been fun. Thank you for joining me.

Joe Henning 39:13
This is all Thankyou. I’m glad we finally did get to connect. I apologize again for the delay but but it’s been a great conversation. Thank you.

Brandon Burton 39:20
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Creating a Vision with Pat Patrick

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

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

Introduction

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

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

Brandon Burton 0:23
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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Guest Introduction

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

Something Interesting About Pat

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

Pat’s dog & best friend-Tucker

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

About the Lodi Chamber

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

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

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Topic-Creating a Vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

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

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

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

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

Future of Chambers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connect with Pat Patrick

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

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

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

Brandon Burton 30:28
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