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Category: workforce development

What Today’s Member Really Want with Barry Phillips

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

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

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Our guest for this episode is Barry Phillips. Barry owned his first software company at age 21 and learned to wear many hats, from head of sales to marketing to it. Plus he’s been a CEO a few times as well. The one constant in his career is that he loves to run teams and organizations, and was actually good at it. Ultimately, his real passion is helping others grow. He’s still doing that today, but he’s changed his focus from large companies like HP Ernst and Young and visa to small and mid sized businesses, and he does this exclusively by working with chambers of commerce across the country, Barry’s been able to help businesses make real rubber hits the road changes that make a positive difference in the organization and the lives of its leaders. Barry injects fun into his speaking, training and consulting. He loves instilling new ideas, and is all about changing process and behaviors to make real positive impact. But Barry, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat podcast. I wanted to give you a chance to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Barry Phillips 2:17
Okay. Well, thank you. I’m glad to be here Brandon. I like that the chamber, Chamber of champions. That’s quite the alliteration you got going. There something interesting about me, I think you mean in the personal sense. I guess stuff that’s unique is I own 17 dutch ovens. Do you even know what a Dutch oven is? I

Brandon Burton 2:39
do? Yes, I grew up in scouting and whatnot. So, oh yeah,

Barry Phillips 2:45
those cast iron pots you you picture the old wagon master with his thing hanging over a fire, and that’s kind of what it was in the 1800s still with look kind of the same with the cooking has advanced quite a bit, and I’ve done competition cooking with those things as well. So I do all sorts of cooking, but kind of getting known for the Dutch oven stuff, I guess, just because it’s a little bit more unique than other things. But that’s something unique about me anyway.

Brandon Burton 3:14
How does one amass a collection of 17 dutch ovens?

Barry Phillips 3:18
Well, you purchased them one of the time.

Brandon Burton 3:21
Is it on accident, or is it purpose?

Barry Phillips 3:24
My first one is I had a brother in law come up in California and bought a whole bunch of them to take back to to people in California. And he got there and counted them and realized that he had two more than he actually paid for. He said, would you take these back to the store for me? And I said, well, so I just called up the store and said, how much you want for these things? I don’t want things? I didn’t want to drive the store was about an hour away, and I didn’t want to do that, so I I just paid for them, and so, well, I’ve got a little might look like cooking with them, and just kind of went from there.

Brandon Burton 3:53
The rest is history, as they say, yeah. Well, tell us a little bit about your company. I know I shared some of that in your bio, but tell us what it is that you do your interest in chambers and the work that you do with them and and kind of help set the stage for a conversation today. Well,

Barry Phillips 4:10
my background is I’m a serial entrepreneur, and I have been doing that for years, running my own businesses a lot, and I’ve worked inside billion dollar corporations and things as well, but I’ve spent a lot of time in training and consulting. And as you said, your bio big companies like Hewlett Packard or Ernst and younger bees are 10 worth those kinds of companies, and had some good success. There really good success. But still, the organizations are so large it’s really hard to affect real change. And so kind of in the post covid world, obviously, there weren’t a lot of folks out there wanting to do in person training and going into corporations to help do things that way. People were pretty timid there for a while, and so I thought to myself, you know, I’ve always worked with small businesses as well. I like them the best, because you can affect real change and much faster. Yeah. And so I thought, well, where you go for that? Well, Chambers of Commerce seemed like a logical place. And so I started playing with some chambers and speaking and doing some training inside their organizations, and I found some interesting commonalities, and that is that most chambers didn’t have a lot of money. I didn’t, didn’t take a lot of research to figure that one out. It was kind of blatant there, but I found that the members really needed the training just as much as a big corporation of probably more people that own small to mid sized businesses. There’s a lot of stuff they need to do that they don’t normally know how to do when you start a business because you love what it is you do. If it’s a restaurant, you are a good cook, and so you thought you’d start a restaurant up, or you want a clothing boutique, you know, you liked fashion, or whatever. And all of a sudden, you find out, when you get into business, there’s these annoying things called people that you have to deal with all the time. And it’s a people business. I don’t care what your business is. I don’t care if you’re a plumber, you are in, still in a people business, because you have to go out and deal with customers. And customers are always human beings. No matter how much AI wants to affect our lives, you still will get money paid to you by another person. That’s how life works. And so my background is really in those areas of helping not I mean, I have done a lot of marketing. My first job was in an advertising agency as a graphic artist, and I’ve worked in and doing marketing and sales and all those things. I was top salesman worldwide. In fact, the people can’t see this, but I’m going to show you Brandon. You see the picture of me standing by that Corvette? I do. They won that Corvette for being top salesman in the world. And so got some background and those kinds of things as well. But that’s, again, a people skill, right? And so ultimately, started sharing that with other companies, and doing my own training and consulting, and have done that for a number of years as well, and just really trying to help people out and anything from that. I mean, they need to know about finance. They need to know about all sorts of things, but usually they have a primary skill set in one area and know a little bit about the other things, but they don’t know everything they need to know to really make their business go. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 7:26
I always think of the example of a dentist who goes to dental school. They spend a lot of time, lots of education, learning how to drill teeth and put in fillings and, you know, do work in your mouth, right? But how much do they get taught about how to hire and how to work with an office staff, and how to file taxes and how to do these different aspects that are important and necessary with running a business

Barry Phillips 7:50
well. And, you know, funny, because I’ve helped some desks, I’ve done, done some training with them, and I remember when Dennis coming to me and saying, Ah, you know, I’ve got all these assistants and all these. There’s all these women in this office, and I just don’t really know how to keep them on track, keep them doing the right things. And as I delve into it, the people in the office are saying, you know, he’s a good dentist, but he doesn’t really know how to work with people and how to motivate people, and and, and that’s the thing, when you are top level in a business, doesn’t matter what it is. You affect way more than you think you do. You just do. And it’s different for people, because they think, Well, you know, things are going well. Sometimes they think it’s all them, and that’s probably not completely true, but if it’s going bad, it’s definitely a big part of you, because most companies don’t die from competitors beating them. Most companies implode one way or the other. They make wrong choices, they don’t stay up with their markets. But all these things are are leadership issues. They’re not staying on top of the things they need to to make the business work. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 8:59
that makes a lot of sense, and that is actually a perfect segue to introduce what our topic for our conversation is today, which is, we’ll be focusing our conversation around what members really want and actually probably what they need, but we’ll, we’ll dive in much deeper into this conversation as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Barry, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking today about what it is that members really want. So as a chamber of commerce listening, they’ve got, you know, likely, hundreds, maybe over 1000 members. Possibly these are all different businesses. But what are some of these commonalities? What are these things that they really want and that they need, especially as it comes to their membership, and how the chamber can help affect change with these members?

Barry Phillips 11:38
Yeah, and that’s a pretty broad subject for you, for what they want, what they really, really want. I tried to get you to sing that with me, but yeah, no, go. Yeah, they wouldn’t like my singing either. But there are some things they that they know they want, and there’s a lot of things that they need and should want, and that’s where a chamber is really important because they’ve got a one prove the relevancy a chamber has to be something more than what people think of a chamber when they aren’t in one, right? They think a chamber is there to give me a little bit of networking opportunity, and maybe they do a ribbon cutting ceremony for me. And they kind of don’t know all the things that a chamber can do for them, but what the chamber can do for them is the things that they really want and they really need, one of which is training. I’ve obviously been in that world for years and and good training is expensive. I mean, guys like me, not, you know, I’m not saying I’m anything special that way, but people like me that go out and do this, they’re five to 15 to $20,000 a day, small companies aren’t going to touch that. They just can’t. There’s no way they can afford it. And that’s where I kind of came in with my what I’m doing with chambers, was trying to find a way to make that completely affordable for chambers to bring to their members and so but the things that they really want first and foremost, if they’re astute and they’re good leaders, trying to do the right things, is they understand their stuff they don’t know. And they need to understand things about leading people managing teams. How do you get these people to perform? How do you get them to stay How do you get them to be happy and productive? All those things, those are skills that can be learned. Not everybody’s a natural born leader that just walks in and and when they smile, the little twinkle happens on their tooth, and everybody loves them. That doesn’t typically happen. We learn this stuff, right? We get good at it because we’ve practiced it.

Brandon Burton 13:37
That’s so key, because so many people, I think, will try to wing it. You know, they where they it really, what it falls back to is what they’ve seen, right? Yeah, so the examples that they’ve seen in their life, maybe they worked for an employer that did something, you know, this way. So they see that as that’s the way things get done, and very well, and probably oftentimes, is that example that they are falling back on, is probably not the best example. And if you look at, you know, how well were they liked, how well did you know, what was their retention of their staff like? You know, all these different things, but that’s what you have to fall back on. Is what you’ve seen, you know, so as an example for you, and the

Barry Phillips 14:17
first step for them is to realize, well, I wrote a book on leadership. In fact, in the opening sentence is, it’s your fault, and then the second sentence is, what? What is your fault? Whatever it was that caused you to finally read a leadership book. But people have more influence and impact on their companies. Think about that. If you’re loyal to a company, you just love it there. Why is that? Is it because you like the logo, you’re just completely in love with the product, whatever it is, the answer is, you like the people you’ll work with and the people you work for. That’s what makes you love a company, because in the larger organizations, you can find people who love working there and people who hate working there. And the difference is they’re the people around them. And. Leaders set the tone of all that stuff, and so they just got to learn those skills of how to if communicate effectively. They’ve got to learn the basics of sales and marketing. There’s just so many things that they need to do to be able to do this job. And they do have to understand a bit about business. You have to set your business up correctly so that you are in the right tax you know, for you know, most people start off with it. They’re just a sole proprietor, or something simple like that. But as that grows, you know, as one of my companies grew, my accountant said you don’t change. You need to be a Sub S Corporation. You shouldn’t be that anymore. It’s killing you in taxes on yourself, and first year I flipped, I made $6,000 more just on the tax savings from the previous year. You just have to know those things. You don’t have to be an expert at it, but you have to know enough that you can read a P and L and a balance sheet. If you don’t know what those are, you better learn what those are. This is the stuff will make your business work or die, because if you don’t, if you’re just running it completely off a spreadsheet and just kind of winging it, that’s going to come back to bite you, yeah, especially if your company is successful.

Brandon Burton 16:09
Well, in that example, there’s, there’s a time where you need to bring in an expert, you know, your accountant, for example. But before you do that, you need to be able to look at your PNL and what your balance sheet looks like, and be able to see, Okay, that looks like, maybe something’s off here. Or I need to put more attention here. And then, then you can take it to the expert and say, help me out here, because you’ve been able to notice something. If you just, you know, outsource it all to the accountant. Very rarely are they going to come to you and say, you know, I’m noticing some things here. There’s, you’re just one in their list, and if you’re not paying attention for yourself, things will continue to get missed well,

Barry Phillips 16:46
and you hate to bring this up, but if, if a company ever gets embezzled, it’s just by the accountants, because he’s controlling all the money. And some business owner just said, I don’t want to know about that stuff. It stresses me. You handle it. You can’t just do that. You have to have your fingers in it enough to know what’s going on and to understand it. You never want to completely trust those critical things of your business, not that you’re the best one at doing them or the fastest of doing them, but you can do them, you can understand what’s going on. So that means financial is one of those places you start very first structure your company, right? And then understand finances. You need to understand what it really takes to grow your business. It’s amazing how many people don’t really know what their what their product, whatever it is costs. What is the real cost of that? You know, people out there at a restaurant selling food, and if they were to add up all their costs, they’re selling this plate for less than that, it actually cost them to make what are they doing? Isn’t that crazy? What? But you see it on, you know, reality TV shows or whatever. But it happens in real life all the time. If you don’t have a hold of your numbers, you’re nuts. I mean, you have to know that stuff.

Brandon Burton 17:56
Yeah. So you’ve touched on a few things here, from taxes and finances, to HR to I’ll even say the culture within the company, within the business. What are some of these other things that come top of mind to you? Of things you’ve come across people, let

Barry Phillips 18:12
me touch real quickly on the what one you just said? You just said, culture? Yeah, a good friend of mine started a business. He started several businesses, but when he started his last one, in particular, he was just all about culture. That’s all he cared about, was culture. Culture. Culture said, Dude, it’s just you and and your partner that you’re starting this with. What do you what do you mean? Culture? He said, Well, you have to understand culture is how we treat each other, and we have to figure that out, and we have to do it right. And now his company happens to be the largest company in the HR world, or mid to small sized businesses, and they’re in the top 10 in the world for having the best culture people want to be there. He can even pay them a little bit less if he wants to, because they love being there so much. He could probably get away with that. But part of his culture is treating his people well. He does things like, after 40 hours of work, you’re out of here, you do not take work home with you. You’ll be in trouble if you do. We insist that you don’t be here more than 40 hours a week. He gives them paid vacation. In fact, he pays for their vacation. Bring me back receipts, and I’ll pay $2,500 for airline tickets and hotel rooms and whatever He wants His people to have good lives. It’s a culture that’s phenomenal. So that’s one of the things. When you build the right culture, it attracts good people. The people want to stay, and all those things start to happen. So they need to understand that human side, probably more than anything.

Brandon Burton 19:44
Yeah, that’s a good example, a real good case study right there, as far as culture goes,

Barry Phillips 19:50
Yeah, I mean, now that he has 1000s of employees, it’s pretty tough to turn that wheel when you got 1000s of people to do it differently. Yeah, there are ways to do that. I. And then they need to understand what really matters to their people. I ask this to people all the time, what is more important to you, shareholders, employees or customers? Who do you focus on? And I get all three of those answers in a room whenever I ask it. So Brandon, what’s the answer?

Brandon Burton 20:20
Well, I think your employees need to be up there at the top, otherwise you can’t serve your shareholders or your customers, because you won’t have the employees to make things happen.

Barry Phillips 20:30
See, you should put a ghost star on your forehead. You got that exactly right, right? It is people, you see companies that are customer focused, customer focused, customer focused, and people hate working there. I mean, Amazon will now hire you off their website without even interviewing you if they’re so desperate for employees. And it’s part of the culture. Yes, they try to treat customers well, but if you don’t treat the people well, because guess what happens when you treat people well? They like their jobs. They’re happy with their jobs. That comes through to customers. Customers want to be associated with a business like that, they actually get more money coming in and more sales because of that, which then makes the shareholder happy. It’s the only way it works to get all three of them happy is to focus on your people. They actually matter most. Yeah, so you are dead on on that one awesome

Brandon Burton 21:16
I’ve pat myself on the back. Yeah, you should. So what are some of these other areas that stand out to you about what, what Chamber members really want, or what they need that they maybe they don’t know they want it because but they need it to be able to understand, to be able to operate their business. Well,

Barry Phillips 21:35
one of the things is, we got to talk about technology a little bit. They have to understand what’s going on in their online footprint. And you’ll hear some people saying, let’s try. We’ll have an online footprint. Oh yes, you do. If you don’t have one, it’s happening to you. There is conversation somewhere about you going online, and if you’re not controlling that, if you’re not involved in that, then you’re in trouble. Now that doesn’t mean you have to be an expert at social media and all that stuff and and necessarily be doing all those things. You can have somebody help you with that, set that stuff up, give you a great website, all those things. But you have to know what matters for your business. You have to know where the focus is. You know, I think it was John Paul Getty once said that half of all marketing is waste. Yeah, half of our marketing and advertising is wasted. We just don’t know which half. Well, that’s no longer true, because you can actually do testing online if you know what you’re doing and see, oh, that didn’t work. Oh, that does work. And all of a sudden you start to know which half is a waste, and you start focusing your marketing in the right places. If you’re in a tourist business, there are certain websites and things that matter to you. If you’re not in that business, then maybe you don’t want your TripAdvisor probably does not matter to you if you’re a clothing store, but it might if you’re selling things in a tourist town, it might still matter to you, but you have to know those kinds of things. And while somebody else may manage that, when people start to comment about you online, you’re the one that needs to answer. You need to look every single day whether you like it or not, and have people show you how to do it. You need to go and talk about and respond back to people’s positive comments and their negative comments and tell them what you’re doing to fix it and invite them back. And invite them back so they can you can show them the changes you’ve made. All that kind of stuff matters. You need to get your your things set up correctly with Google, so that you are controlling your brand and your name and that you’re on the map correctly, and all those things you can do. But you have to know how and it matters, no matter what your business is, there’s nobody, hardly anymore that go, that goes and does business without checking out a company first online. Yes, it’ll be partly your website, but it’ll be your social media footprint in whatever places that matter. Probably Google searches are big deals no matter who you are, yeah, like, a like Google or not, they still kind of own the world of people searching and looking for reviews and things like that.

Brandon Burton 24:07
Yeah, and I’ve mentioned it before on the podcast, but my background has been in advertising and media and chamber publishing and whatnot. And Chamber members all the time will talk to me about the ad that they’re placing with the chamber, and they’ll want to get into the details of you know, well, what bullet points should I put in the ad? What? What about the phone number? Should I have a unique phone number? And, like, really trying to overthink things, and to your point, nobody does business with anybody without checking them out online first. So you want to put that, that carrot out there that really draws the attention, take them to your website, have a unique call to action, and then there’s a process to be able to educate them about the rest of the things you do. But if you try to bombard with too much on the front end, they’re going to ignore you, and they’re going to go to your website anyways. If there’s any interest to learn more, you know,

Barry Phillips 24:59
and. Again, no matter what your business is, you need to learn what your pitch is. What do people think of you? What is, what is the image you have to others? I don’t care how much you know about what you do and how cool you think that is. Does that matter? Even with what I am now doing for chambers, it used to take me 40 minutes in a zoom call to explain it to you. I went to a couple live events, and that’s, in fact, where you and I met, at one of those, and I, by the end of that, I could do my entire pitch in about a minute and a half. Yeah, I had learned what people cared about, or what they didn’t, not what I cared about, but what they cared about, because that’s one of the key things, is you better be selling what people want, not what you have?

Brandon Burton 25:40
Yeah, they talk about they call it the elevator pitch, right? You got 60 seconds in front of somebody, and if you can’t explain what you do, then do you really know what you do? Do you know?

Barry Phillips 25:50
Because the point is, people are going to look at you, and if they don’t get you, they’re not going to give you 510, minutes to figure out what you are. They’re going to give you a few seconds. And if you can’t hone down what you are, even if you’re a restaurant or something like that, that ought to be obvious. Well, we sell food, yeah. But why should I come into yours versus the other five on the same block? Right? They need to get you very, very quickly. And you need to hone that down any business, even if, again, if you’re a pipe fitter, I don’t care what it is, they need to understand why you and what it is you do very, very quickly. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 26:24
great stuff. As we begin to wrap things up here, I like asking everyone I have on the show that for chambers listening who are trying to take their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with that chamber to help them accomplish that goal?

Barry Phillips 26:45
Well, for chambers, it’s interesting because some chambers are pretty aggressive about forward thinking, and some are just trying to hang on and trying to rebuild back from the pandemic and all those kinds of things. But they need to understand they’ve got to have unique offerings that give them something that others don’t have, that the chamber can provide, that they can’t get any other way. Networking is certainly that you need to have good networking opportunities for people to get to know people. But you know, if they’re still in the same room week after week or month after month, looking at the same people, that’s not as stimulated as needs to be. So you need to be growing and bringing new people in. And I know it sounds self serving, but you need a training component with what I’m doing for chambers, for example, you they can’t get any new way through the chamber. They couldn’t afford it. Couldn’t come close to affording it any other way. And so you need to have things like that that are things that chambers need to help with. Maybe you can bring on a a consultant once in a while, really good people that will help people understand how to do the financial parts of their business. They need to have HR experts. You need to be bringing them a stream of people that can give them what they need, so that they can have a reason to keep coming back to you. I mean, that’s, that’s the bottom line. Are you still relevant to me? Now I don’t need you to do a ribbon cutting ceremony anymore. What can you do for me now? Why should I come back this year? You gotta stay relevant. You gotta get them tangible stuff that matters.

Brandon Burton 28:15
And the good news for a chamber and staying relevant is there’s always new things. With how fast the economy moves these days, with how fast technology moves, there’s always a need to educate and to get more valuable information from your members who don’t have the time to do the research themselves and to put it all out there. But maybe it’s a lunch and learn kind of a format. You come for lunch. They’re going to eat lunch anyways. And can they take something away as they do that? Maybe it’s a podcast episode where you bring on an expert and they’re sharing these tips. Maybe it’s bringing in somebody like Barry who has his platform to be able to train and educate and bring your members to the next level. And

Barry Phillips 28:56
I will tell you, you’ve all been to one of those Lunch and Learns where you thought you’re going to get 45 minutes of education. What you got was a 45 minute sales pitch. Right? Make sure you’re not bringing somebody in that just wants to sell you on their insurance or on whatever you need. To get speakers that come and bring real content that people need without doing a pushy sales pitch on them. That’s what they need.

Brandon Burton 29:18
Yeah, because otherwise they won’t come back to the next lunch and learn, and they’ll think the chambers just, they just sell to me all the time, right? Yeah. So Well, Barry, I like asking everyone, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, I know you’re you’ve dove into the the chamber world, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Barry Phillips 29:43
Well, chambers do have a lot of purposes, some of which from the past still are relevant to the future. Right? Good. Chambers are even involved in what is best for small businesses from the Washington political front, and they’re making affiliations with the. Know the local town councils and mayors all the way up to their state senates and those kinds of things where they can have that impact. And that’s important. They’ve got to keep doing that. But they do need to be able to provide things online. They need to give people a reason to come back and think about the chamber. You’re an association. Most of them aren’t associated directly with with the local government. Some are, but why? Why are they doing that? What is it you’re bringing to them? Education is a big, big piece of that, but so is giving them the ability to meet other people, to have horizons open to them. You need to be going as a chamber to events where you can see what the next thing is, and you start bringing new things on board, and always bringing new ideas and new products and things to them that you know people will. Some people think, Oh, I can’t raise my rates on my people. Well, you can’t. If you don’t show value, if you show enough value you can and it will make a big difference. You just got to be willing to go out there and say, here’s where, what we give you that you can’t get any place else, to be able to list off the education, the the help with HR, the help with whatever it is that you think is relevant for your for your people, and how to do that, and you’ve got to make sure that you can again, for you, you gotta have a sales pitch that’s very quick. Here’s what the chamber can do for you. Here’s the unique things we offer. You can’t get any place else, and you get this all for this amount of money. That’s a steal. That’s

Brandon Burton 31:32
right. And I love that. Taking it back to the sales pitch of the chamber, everybody’s in a sales good.

Unknown Speaker 31:39
I mean, you just don’t having that line

Brandon Burton 31:40
of this is what we provide that you can’t get anywhere else. That is so key. So I love it. Barry, I want to give you a chance to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect and learn more about the services you offer, or just more about what we discussed today in this podcast episode. Where would you point them? What would be the best way for them to connect with you?

Barry Phillips 32:04
Well, there’s a couple of things. I’ve created a special website just for the heads of chambers, and it’s called chamber offer.com pretty easy to remember. You go there and there’s like eight little videos, then they’re all partly me on there. Sorry about that, but you’ll, you’ll be able to go through and I’ll walk you through all the things that that I offer with my online what I offer as a way for chambers to bring an online resource that’s live, that’s engaging and has a permanent library of stuff to it as well, bringing great content of education to your people. And it’s such a way that chambers can actually make money off of it. And it’s something that your members just really, really need. And so if you go to my regular website, BarryKPhillips.com you’ll get a flavor of my background there that that particular websites probably more suited for the big companies that I’ve worked with over the years, but you’ll see who I am there. Chamberoffer.com will give you exactly what you need, but contact me directly. Just go to Barry at Barry K Phillips com and reach out. I’d love to talk with you. Um, the phone number is 801-358-5525.

Brandon Burton 33:16
very good, and we will get all that in our show notes for this episode to make it easy for everyone to click on chamber offer.com and and see exactly what it is that you offer in your your stance with what you can do to help chambers. But Barry, this has been a great conversation. Hopefully it’s got the wheels turning with those chambers that are listening and and thinking of ways to really stay relevant and to put their value out there within their business community and stay top of mind for those businesses in their community. So thank you for sharing all this with us today, and it’s been great to have you on the show.

Barry Phillips 33:47
Thanks for having me. Brandon, I really appreciate it.

Brandon Burton 33:51
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Demystifying AI with Craig Turner

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

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

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

Our guest for this episode is Craig Turner. Craig is the visionary Founder and President of Momentum, the Business Growth Agency, Momentum for Chambers and Momentum AI. Momentum excels at driving ROI for companies through their innovative approach to chambers of commerce, memberships and sponsorships. Additionally, the agency offers top tier consulting services, Ambassador training and comprehensive member benefit programs for chambers a trailblazer in the field of AI. Craig is a sought after consultant providing cutting edge AI training and solutions to chambers and small businesses. His expertise in AI has made him a prominent speaker on the subject, captivating audiences with eye opening but practical educational insights before launching momentum, Craig spent eight years with the Buffalo Niagara partnership, the Regional Chamber of Commerce, where he led governmental affairs and business development. Currently, Craig chairs the Niagara USA Chamber of Commerce board of directors and also the chambers Advocacy Committee, embodying the ethos of I’m not just a president also I’m also a client. Momentum is an active member in chambers of commerce across western and central New York, Southern Ontario, Central Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh. But Craig, I’m excited to have you on the podcast today. I’d love to give you a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to tell us something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better. Well,

Craig Turner 2:43
this is fantastic. Bryn, I really appreciate you having me on and the opportunity to chat about all the stuff that we do with the chambers, and especially you mentioned we’re going to talk about. AI, yeah, you had asked me to kind of think of something interesting to talk about, and I want to, let’s see if I can hold this up for the video. So this is a novel. I’m a novelist. I’ve written eight novels, and I got another one coming out soon that I think chamber professionals are gonna like. I’m holding up a novel called The campaign. And if you can see the cover, if you’re listening on audio, it’s CA, MP, and then AI is capitalized in the middle of the word campaign. And I wrote this book in 2020 and 2021 and I published it in early 2022 This was before open act. Open AI made chassis, PT, accessible to the world. So this is when AI was still kind of hidden behind the curtain. So the book is about mankind’s first foray into running an AI for political office, which, interestingly enough, a story came out earlier this year that someone in Colorado is trying to do that, because I’m so steeped in Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber of Commerce is woven throughout the story. And in fact, the pinnacle event in the book is a Chamber of Commerce event, which I love to tell this story. What the interesting thing is that what I didn’t realize is that when I was writing this book, was that, you know, two, three years later, I would be steeped in AI and training and speaking and sitting on the chamber podcast talking about AI. So it’s kind of a full circle thing that I, that I, you know, personally, I appreciate myself.

Brandon Burton 4:19
Yeah, very meta, right? Writing about it now you’re in it, right? That’s that’s cool. Well, tell us a little bit more about momentum, just all the different facets of it, what you do, how you work with chambers, what you offer, just to kind of, you know, put it in a nutshell, so people who are hearing about momentum for the first time can have an idea of what you

Craig Turner 4:40
do, absolutely. So I’ll go back. I’ll go back to the mid 2000s actually, when I started working for the chamber. So I ran government affairs. That’s what I was hired to do. I was a lobbyist, and, you know, ran the committee. About halfway through my tenure at the Chamber was the great recession. So 2008 2009 2000 10 and I gave our board a lot of credit at the time, because they said, Look, people are going to hit harder Financial Times. They’re going to start coming back to us and saying, Why am I giving you $1,500 what am I? What am I getting for this money like they never have before? That was always the good community citizen before. That was your chamber member. So we put together teams, seven people. We met with 400 companies during the during the Great Recession, and the goal was to we had a six page survey. Now you weren’t supposed to give the six page survey. You were supposed to be conversational, but you were supposed to come back to the office and find three to five things to help that company with based on your conversation and the stuff we on Earth was unbelievable. We never would have had done some of the things we did. One of my favorite things, I talk about a warehouse on the east side of Buffalo. We said, You know what can we help you with? And he goes, You know what? He goes, there’s a bus stop right in front of my front door, and people gather around it. My clients complain that they can’t get in and out of the building. Can you do something about it? And we said, I don’t know. We’ll see. We’ll try. So we called the right people, and next thing you know, they moved the bus stop 15 feet down the sidewalk. I’m like, have we How could we possibly have known that? But think about it, that guy’s a chamber member for life, because we were able to do that for him. And to this day, I still drive over there, and I’m like, Yeah, we did that. Look at that bus stop. Um, but that being said, we had an 88% retention, membership retention rate during the recession, when I went to the ACCE conference that blew everybody away. So eventually, when I left the chamber, I’m like, This is my business. I’m going to help, except I’m going to flip it my clients at momentum. What we do is we help them build a strategy for their chambers of commerce, and we manage it throughout the year, because we know that most companies do not have someone on staff doing this every day. So it works in primarily two ways. Take here in Buffalo Niagara Falls, where I am, a company a client might be involved with four or five chambers I manage. We manage all those relationships. We tell them what events to attend. We tell them where to put sponsorship dollars. It’s part of the, you know, the kind of the holistic view at their their chamber membership. It also works for market entry. The client can say, hey, we’re opening in a warehouse in Kansas City. Well, I know the people at the Kansas City Chamber, we can walk right in and start to do business on day one. Because, you know, I spend most of my time building relationships, like I’m doing today with chambers of commerce across the US and Canada. So I’m rolling this out on LinkedIn, and all of a sudden the chamber started to come and say, Hey, we really like what you’re saying about member value. Can you come consult with us? Now? What’s neat, I never saw that coming. I had to go back. I had to redesign the website. I had to change everything. But yes, now we have a full suite of services for chambers that include Ambassador training. Is probably the one we’re most well known for. We do you know, strategic planning, consulting and those kind of things too. And then the third part of it is enter AI, which we started to talk about earlier, about two years ago, when open AI made chatgpt available to the public. I said, I’m in. We’re gonna we’re gonna dive as deep as we can into this for ourselves, for our own company, so we can use it to grow our company. But what I said was, look, I know the my audiences, the chambers themselves, and typically, small and medium sized businesses do not have time to do that. So I’m going to learn everything I can. I’m going to curate the best stuff, and I’m going to share it with the community, which has turned into trainings and everything. Well, that turned into trainings, it turned into speaking, it turned into programming. I mean, that’s the big one that I didn’t again. I did not see this coming, and just a few months ago, we launched our AI platform for Chambers of Commerce. So now, if you look at like my business card, we’ve got momentum for business, momentum for chambers and momentum AI all represented on there, and they all tie together.

Brandon Burton 8:50
Yeah, fascinating. Well, I’m, I’m excited to get into the conversation today. I know AI is a hot topic. There’s Buzz, as he said, for the last couple of years, since ChatGPT rolled out the or I guess when open AI rolled out ChatGPT, it’s really kind of taken the world by storm and been a huge adoption rate for ChatGPT, but also AI in general, and I’m excited to dive in and really get into demystifying. Ai, as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Craig, we’re back. So as I mentioned before, the break today, we’re going to be diving in about how to demystify AI and I know you and I have been connected through LinkedIn and just knowing each other for some time now, and back and forth. So I see these things that you’re rolling out, these experiments that you’re doing with AI and and some cool things, like you did an experiment where you had aI talking to AI and just having a full on debate and really interesting things. Not that it’s necessarily the practical thing you know that you’re going to instill at your chamber, but it shows what some some of these capabilities are. But as you, as you’ve been, as you’ve jumped into AI, you know, with both feet, what are some of the things that stand out to you? And then as a chamber, to help a chamber wrap their head around how to apply AI and really demystify it

Craig Turner 11:59
absolutely, and I’m glad you’re using the word demystify, because that’s, as I’ve learned over the past two years, that is a big part of the process. There’s two ways to look at this. One is the training and the tools and teaching people how to prompt that stuff’s easy. I mean that that’s our bread and butter. We’re trying to spread it as far and wide as we can, and really, we give people a few a few prompts, they can accomplish an awful lot, but it’s that other piece of it. It’s the real world attitudes towards it. So I always say that when you’re teaching somebody AI, you’re teaching them the practical application, but you have to overcome fear, you have to overcome indecision, you have to overcome doubt, and you have to overcome bad press. And it happens, I will post things on LinkedIn, and I’ll get people to push back and say, was that AI or, you know, I don’t know that. I trust that if it’s AI. And the thing is, and I emphasize this all the time, AI is a tool, right? It needs the human input in order to work, I can take a nail and whack it with my hand as much as I possibly can. It’s not going to go into the piece of wood. But if I take a hammer and I pound it in, the nail is going to go into the piece of wood. And this is all AI is, are there bad actors out there? Yes, absolutely. There are, same as, you know, 25 years ago, when the internet started to get in everybody’s hands. Maybe that was longer ago, but, but when the you know, there were bad actors, and they’re still bad actors, does that affect us? Yes, you know, on some levels, it does. But is it a tool that I can use on a daily basis to really save time and money and resources? To be truthful, I say it all the time at momentum, we are now saving 25 to 30 hours a month. I mean, that’s huge that I get that time back. I took a process just earlier this week. I took a process that typically took me three hours. I had it down, I had my systems in place and everything, and it got me down to three hours. I used AI earlier this week, and I got it down to 30 minutes. Wow, I am. You see on LinkedIn how busy I am. For me to buy two and a half hours back into my calendar is absolutely unbelievable. It’s like gold. So, so this is where, you know, yes, I understand people think I start all my presentations with with a picture of the Terminator, and I say, before we get into anything, AI is not taking over the world, all right, AI is a tool that you can use. It’s like any machine that’s ever been created in the history of mankind. It needs a human to put good input into it to get good results. And working together, we’ll save time, save money, save energy, save frustration, and you know, for to take it now, as you, as you said to the chambers, I think it’s critically important for the chambers to know this, the audiences for the chambers are, you know, getting younger. Some millennials, the Gen z’s, are coming next. These are tech savvy people that are going to look to their chamber to say, you know. As I’m growing my business, how can I incorporate tech or I already am I expect you to also know. As much as I do, this is going to be critically important for for chambers to know. And most of, most of the the people that go through our training chambers or businesses otherwise are typically. They haven’t really done anything with AI at all, or they’re dabbling. That’s what most of it is. I’ve done it. I used it to write some tweets, or I used it to, well, I like to show them. And again, you pointed out my LinkedIn, and I share everything I’m thinking on LinkedIn. There’s it’s so much more powerful than just writing tweets, and we’re trying to encourage people to do that.

Brandon Burton 15:39
Yeah, I think one of the LinkedIn posts you’re talking about going on a hike, and you’re writing a book as you hike, because you’re giving these prompts and thoughts into your the I’m not sure exactly which tool you’re using, if it’s chat GPT or something else, but

Craig Turner 15:53
yeah, chat GPT voice is probably the most important tool I’ve ever acquired as A professional, I do a lot of road trips. I’m in the car all the time that, you know, I’m in Pittsburgh. My son goes to school in Pittsburgh. I belong to the chamber at the airport in Pittsburgh, and I spent a lot of time going back and forth. That’s a three and a half hour drive for me. It used to be listening to music and staring out the window. Now it is literally three and a half hours of continuing to do work, and it’s, you know, you get feedback on things. I say it all the time. My favorite prompt is, I have an idea for X, Y and Z, all right. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I have ideas coming all the time. I have an idea for X, Y and Z. What do you think? So? Chat, GPT, voice will take that and it will return me a thought on it, if I like, you know, some feedback on what I said. If I like it, I’ll say, Okay, make me a three month plan to roll that out, and it will lay out the strategy for me to roll the whole thing out. I might not use it tomorrow. I might not use it till next year, but like any brainstorming, it’s out of my head. It’s on paper. Well, on paper in quotes, but and I have a plan to go forward on how to do it. So this is what I spend my time in the car or on walks, and it’s just been, it’s just such an incredible tool. And that time is not I’m one of these guys that works all the time. I work too much. I work at work incessantly. And there would be times when I want to go take a five mile walk, you know, and on a sunny day in the afternoon, well, I would feel too guilty just leaving the office and going and walking for five miles, even on a sunny day in Buffalo and but now I don’t feel guilty. I The one day I had a meeting in Niagara Falls. I checked out. I walked around Niagara Falls for like three hours. I put had my earbuds in, and I probably got more work done walking around Niagara Falls than I would have sitting in my laptop.

Brandon Burton 17:49
Yeah. I love how you say, AI is a tool, right? And the example that the nail, and, you know, the hammer, the nail, the hand, yeah, I think of when, when Google rolled out, yeah, you said somebody might say that they don’t trust AI. If this is AI generated, I don’t trust AI. That’s like saying 2025, years ago. Well, if you got this result from Google, I don’t know that I trust it. I want to pull out the encyclopedias and do all the research myself. You know, like that’s and it seems archaic to say that now, knowing that we see, you know how effective Google is in a search. Well, AI is like Google on on steroids. You know, there’s

Craig Turner 18:27
a meme, there’s a meme I use that I posted fairly often. I actually put in my training recently. Is a because your question, it goes a little to what you’re saying. Goes a little towards the boss employee relationship too, because there are bosses that don’t trust AI, and they are actually handcuffing their their employees to be as productive as they possibly can be. And the meme that I use, it’s a picture of a model, model T I have an antiquated it’s in sepia tones and everything. And there’s a kid standing next to it dressed in 1901 garb, and he’s got a briefcase, and the caption, or the post that I put with it is okay. I want you to take these papers over to the next turn, the next town, but I want you to walk. I don’t want you to take one of those newfangled horseless carriage automobiles, because that would take you a half hour to get there back. This is going to take you six hours to get there back, but I want you to take that route instead, and that’s what we’re doing when you’re telling your employees you can’t use AI. And you know, when people worry about the, you know, the the authenticity of it is, if you’re, you’re, you know, you’re, you’re writing something. You’re putting your name on something you didn’t write. I always tell people, don’t put anything, don’t put your name on anything you didn’t write, whether it’s AI or elsewhere. But the reality is, what they’re forgetting is, it’s the engineering, it’s the prompt engineering. So I may create a piece of output. That, you know, a white paper is a good example. I may do a white paper. I hate writing white papers, and for me, to be honest, most white papers are for SEO. They’re for Google clicks. All right, so if I’m going to write a white paper, I don’t need my name on it. It’s just, it’s a product. I write the white paper, I put it on there, and it starts to get the it starts to get the SEO. Now, is there an ethical piece there that I wrote a white paper with AI and put it out there? No, I’m a prompt engineer. I used prompt engineering. I used AI, and I wrote a really good instruction for the AI to come out with a worthwhile piece of information at the end. That’s what it is, whether I wrote it or myself or not. You know, I’m an author. It was, it was a tough hill for me to climb, to yield any writing to AI, even even tweets and things. But the reality is, I had an epiphany one day. I’m like, Look my books, my blogs and my LinkedIn posts, all me, all human. I said, That’s what I want to put my name on. I said, all that other stuff I have to write press releases and tweets and again, white papers and things like that, website, copy, turn it over to AI, just, let’s be an engineer instead of a writer. And what really got me there, and this back to the boss employee relationship is, you know, in my case, it’s my clients. What did my clients hire me to do? Did they hire me because I’m an author, or did they hire me to find solutions to help grow their business? And that’s what it is. And if you’re an employee and your boss is kind of not letting you do this, this is when you go back to your boss and say, Hey, okay, I have this task that I have to do. It took me an hour last week. If I use AI, it can take me 30 seconds, instead of an hour, that’s 59 and a half minutes, that I can go do other stuff, including calling our members and seeing they’re okay, go and get new members. And that’s where the differenti the differentiator comes in, is that it’s not you have to get out of this mindset that it’s plagiarism or it’s unethical. It you’re an engineer. You weren’t hired to be a writer. You were hired to find solutions. My solution is I can do something in 30 seconds that it used to take an hour to do,

Brandon Burton 22:08
right? But, and with the prompt engineering, you get results, and then you can always adjust it. And just a couple examples, is I had a marketing campaign recently I was putting together, and I told chat GPD, this is what I’m trying to do. And can you give me a marketing plan to roll this out? And it sent me a, you know, several bullet points, you know, this stage of this, and this stage of that. And said, Okay, this is great. Can you put it in an Excel format so then I can track it as I do each thing and then, and I didn’t like everything in it, so I took some things out, I moved some things around, change the order a little bit, so I made it mine. And then another example, just earlier this week, had a need for a contract. Went to chatgpt and said, you know, here’s what I need, and and it spits it right back out. Now, am I going to use that just exactly how they gave it to, how chatgpt gave me? No, I’m going to look at I’m going to adjust it for me, and I’m going to have an attorney review it before handing it over to the other party. But it’s a starting point. And had I just gone to an attorney and said, Here, make a contract for this, that fee is going to be way higher than having a starting point already with what chat GPT provided

Craig Turner 23:15
and it and it, you know, you have to think about your own personal brand when you do it too. A great example is LinkedIn, because people are getting more savvy about what is written by AI. Because most people don’t train their AI, I will tell you that my AI, if I ask it to write like me, it’d be pretty close. Now most people don’t do that. So on LinkedIn, people will write their post with AI. Well, people now know what’s what’s AI and not so you have to think about your personal brand. If you want to put something out there and Brandon, I’m sure you’ve seen it. You you ask chatgpt to write you a LinkedIn post. It puts these ridiculous emojis all through it, right? Everywhere? Yeah, people just cut and paste and put it in well, does your is that good for your brand? Do you want people reading your posts and saying, Oh, he just did AI, that’s a decision you have to make yourself, or is it just about getting the post up every day to for the consistency and everything that’s that’s something that that people have to figure out. I I’m not a fan of just posting LinkedIn, if it like I said, my LinkedIn post, I write my own post intentionally. But, you know, you can see it. You can see it, and

Brandon Burton 24:20
depending on the purposes, it may be very appropriate to write it with AI so your followers can see, wow, Greg knows how to use AI. So there is a time for that. Now, as we put the focus on chambers, what would be some real world applications for a chamber to kind of help them wrap their head around again, demystifying AI, they see it. This is a tool. How can a chamber apply AI, beyond putting out your social media posts or maybe writing your newsletter? What? What are some ways that AI can be incorporated?

Craig Turner 24:53
Sure, I’ll give you, I’ll give you a couple examples, the first of which is, I will confide to you. And all of your listeners,

Brandon Burton 25:02
just don’t tell anybody else, right? Yeah. So

Craig Turner 25:05
at the Niagara County, Niagara USA chamber, we are running a massive small business expo in November. We’re really excited about it’s the first of its kind, and we’ve got, we’ve just got a lot of buzz around it right now. The entire thing was created with AI. Again, I’m, you know, and I steered it, and I’m the Chair, I’m not the staff, so I don’t have time to sit around doing events and stuff. So the program was created with AI, the marketing materials was created with AI. I’m doing an AI presentation there. It was, like, every everything we did that to get started now, like you pointed out, was that the final was that the final product? No, of course, it wasn’t. And then, of course, us humans had to go book all the speakers and everything. But, but to instead of, you know, sitting around and brainstorming, we got something on paper first. We we eliminated the blank page. Got something on paper first, and now we have this beautiful event that we’re putting together that we’re really excited about. So that’s a good one. That’s a great example, because it was one of the things I see with AI is people are afraid to ask for too much. All right, it’s not your executive assistant who’s going to go home and complain about you. Ask whatever you need, and ask for a lot of it. So we give us the whole event design, the whole event for us. And we got outside the box, thinking in there and everything. It’s incredible. So like I said, it’s in that case, the example to the answer your question, What can a chamber use it for? It’s attack that blank page. The blank page is the hardest thing to overcome. You would take the blank page now you’ve got something to give to your team and say, What do you think? So that’s huge. Second example I give you so chat GPT now, Google just released their version of it earlier this week. Is called gpts. Okay? Chat GPT has what they call gpts, which are bots, basically. And what it is is you train you. If you have a process that you do over and over and over again, you can take a chunk of that process and have aI create a system so that all you have to do is, like, enter the most pertinent information and it does it. You don’t have to prompt it every time. So as a great example, and this is free in the GPT store. You can, you can use it if you want to. I’d love it if you did. I created a GPT that does meeting minutes. You can input your your rough notes, and it will create as close to publishable meeting minutes as you’re going to get. You’re still going to edit everything, obviously, but, but it gives you the formatting and everything. And I tried to do that because, again, with chambers, how many meetings do you have a month that you have to do meeting minutes for? If I can, if I can save you a half hour every single time, imagine how much you can get done with that time. But what’s cool about this is, if your writings need enough, you don’t even have to type the notes in. You could take a picture of your page and it’ll do the meeting notes for you. So that’s in the that’s called the minutes maker. I think it’s in the GPT store. We can, we can share that information later, and anybody, anybody can use it. It’s free. But think about your processes that you have at the chamber, and how you can create a bot or a GPT to take some of the sting out of those processes. The other one, the other one I created, I call it networking follow up connector. And basically what it is is I come back from a networking event. Because we all know that the toughest part of networking is follow up. Come back from a networking event. I do a quick I can do a list or a database of the person I met their company. And then it asks for a, you know, one fact about something you talked about, you know, they like rock music, or, you know, they ride in the charity bicycle race. So you put those in, you hit submit, and it gives you the whole list. It gives you a quick blurb that you can cut and paste into LinkedIn for a connection request based on your conversation and everything. It takes 15 seconds, right? And that’s, that’s, that’s in the the in the in the the GPT store too, as well. So, so then, you know, then you get into higher level applications such as data analysis. And, you know, once you and there’s an important piece here, all right, chatgpt and AI, okay, you could do a lot of stuff with it, just the way it is. All right, you can get insights. You can get it’s all based on the internet. All right, the real power of this is when you put data into it, because then you can, you know, then you can manipulate that. And I like and part of the back to that fear conversation. One of the things that I always point out is is we’ve all been using AI all this time, and I’m, if I’m writing a text on my iPhone, and AI is suggesting what the next word should be, that’s AI, the auto complete is the next word, and basically all it is to. Get over that fear of it. All it is is using the data available to predict the next step. That’s what AI is, using the data available to predict the next step. If you don’t input any data, it uses the world’s data the internet. If you input your own data as like on an iPhone, or, you know, on your phone as you’re texting, it’s predicting based on your behavior, your activity, what the next word is? The next, the power of AI for chambers and for businesses is, you can input your own data. You could put your member list and, say, extract this information. You could, you do that. So this is, this is teeing up to where, where we’ve gone. Is momentum, which back several weeks ago we launched the momentum AI platform. And basically what that does is we have an AI that you can send to new members. And basically when a chamber subscribes, we have we train the chamber on 2/3 we train the AI in two things. We train it on your chamber. So your mission, your vision, your committees, your events, everything, and then we train it on what we call the momentum way of doing businesses, which is whatever everything that I described at the at the beginning, when your member puts their information in, which is, you know, what are you trying to accomplish? What do you need to meet? And they hit, submit, it returns to them automatically based on those three databases together a customized strategy to make the most of their chamber membership. So it’s everything we do at momentum, but put into an AI format to make sure more people can do it. What’s cool about it beyond that? First of all, there’s a wow factor there. Nobody’s nobody’s joining their chamber expecting to get an AI strategy on the first day that they joined. But what’s cool about it, for the Chamber’s perspective, is because we’re giving them an AI, we’ve gotten them to now fill out a form that that form goes to the chamber, so now you’re able to collect all this data on your on your new members that you might not otherwise be able be able to get. So So that’s like taking what your question, what can chambers do with AI to the next level? That’s not something we can do just in chatgpt, that required programming and everything, but, but it’s, we’re excited, and it’s, it’s taken off,

Brandon Burton 32:15
and that really gives, puts the credibility of the chamber through the roof, too. As you mentioned earlier, these millennials and Gen X, you know, these that are coming into our Gen Z, I guess, that are coming into the workforce now that have these expectations of I’m already using tech. I’m already using AI in my business. I expect you to as well. And then their first interaction with the chamber, they’re interacting with AI and getting custom information back, and then for the chamber to collect that data. And, like I said, like having data to give back to AI is huge, and being able to leverage it. So, I mean, you sold me, Craig, you sold me.

Craig Turner 32:54
And that’s and that’s critically important, because, and here’s the way I break it down. I give tough love. Actually, I posted on LinkedIn this morning. In fact, you ever see that meme with the guys with his girlfriend and he’s looking back? Okay? So I posted that, and I said, this is my worry with chambers. And basically what it is is this is so important right now. AI is so important. I even tell people I think it’s more important than workforce at this point right now, but it’s so important that businesses are looking for the information. All right, if I’m a chamber and I I have companies that are my members, the last thing I want right now is that business going somewhere else to get AI training and get AI information and thought leadership, because you know what, if I’m paying $350 for my chamber membership over here, but I just paid 30 bucks to go to an AI training, I can guarantee you, the AI training is going to change their operations. It’s going to change their lives and make it easier. And I’m going to start going, why didn’t I get that from my chamber where I’m a member over here? I’m telling every chamber run an AI program, right if you haven’t run one already, run one right now. And it can be thought leadership. It could be practical application, whatever you want to do, just make sure that you’ve attached your chamber name to AI right now. However, you can before someone else in the community picks up the picks it up and runs with it. You know. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 34:18
great advice. If you don’t mind. I’d like to lean into that just a little bit more. Your comment. About AI being more important than workforce, that stands out to me. I just finished, you know, wrapping up the chamber of the year finalist series that I do here on the podcast. And almost every chamber of the year finalist has some sort of a workforce initiative, and to say AI is more important than workforce, I wanted to hear more of your thoughts on that, and have chambers, really, you know, tune in as you explain what you mean by that,

Craig Turner 34:48
absolutely. And I don’t get me wrong. I don’t deny the importance of workforce. And I, and I the chambers that you, that you’ve interviewed and work with, I’m familiar with a lot of some of their workforce program I’ve. Steven workforce here in western New York for the last 25 years. But there are realities in workforce, right? There’s only so many people to do these things, and companies I think, really need to start just, just this morning, I had a conversation with a guy in logistics and warehousing, a colleague, and he was talking about, we’ve got demand, we’ve got space, we’ve got we got technology, we just we don’t have the people to do it. So when a company comes, and it’s a great example, because he’s not even talking about, he’s not even talking about new business, he’s talking about a company that’s already a client growing saying, Okay, I need another 30,000 square feet of warehouse space. I have the space, I have everything unique, except I can’t take care of that space for you because I don’t have the people. So the reality is there, and again, I’m not, we’re not talking about technology stealing jobs, all right, this is something we’ve been talking about for 20 years with the travel agents and whatnot, but, but the reality is, there are jobs that if nobody wants to do them, they still need to get done. And you know, the cost of running a small business continues to rise. You know, even minimum wages are rising, so that’s driving up your cost of personnel and everything. There are lots of solutions you can do with AI. AI will change your your operation. I was at a chamber event last week in Pennsylvania, and it was a joint chamber event between a between a few chambers. Two of the of the chambers came up and told me that my training changed their life. I mean, that’s huge. I’m not saying that to pump us up or drive people to our training. I’m just saying it blows my mind, because people are consistently coming up and saying that I’m not really teaching them anything, that in the end, if they, if they took some time and got on and just played with chatgpt themselves, that that they couldn’t figure out on their own. But sometimes it takes somebody like me to open their eyes to say, you know, with a few My training is typically a lot of practicality. But of course, I throw a few wow factor things in there, where people are like, Wow. I didn’t realize you could do that. Well, yeah, well, try it. You can. So, so that’s where I am. I think the workforce programs are absolutely critical. We need to continue to train the work for the workforce of the future, to match the jobs of the future. But AI is a solution for many, many businesses, if not all businesses and the chambers to tackle some of these workforce challenges in a meaningful way. And it’s not again, we’re not replacing jobs, but if I got this, I’ve got this task, and I could take 50% of it and turn it over to AI, how much time does that buy me back in the day to continue to to add to other things? So yeah, I know that’s a bold statement, because, you know, workforce chambers bread and butter, but, but the good thing is, I’ve been involved with workforce initiatives, and they go for years and years and years and years. AI, you run a three part webinar series, you’re in the mix?

Brandon Burton 38:03
Yeah, no, I appreciate the clarification on that. I figured it was going to be somewhere in that direction. But I think if any, if the pandemic taught us anything, is it really revealed those jobs that people don’t want to do, and chambers across the country now are seeing that shortage in workforce in certain segments, and that’s where AI can come in and be the answer to so many of these things in regards to workforce so

Craig Turner 38:29
and I believe I understand it’s a lot to keep up with. That’s why I said my I’ve taken on the role of curating all this. I mean, you see AI everywhere you go. I mean, everybody knows chatgpt and Gemini and co pilot and Claude is another one that people use and meta and act, or meta and x. So those are like the big six that people use for day to day prompting. But if I open, you know, when we finish the Zoom call, you’re going to get an AI output. When I open a PDF, it says, Do you want an AI? An AI summary of the PDF. It’s every time you, everybody’s using it, and it’s every time you open a thing. I mean, the the images. I mean, you’ve seen my LinkedIn. You know, I don’t post about an AI generated image. But what I love about that is I could do whatever I want. I use this image of a I have a lot of clients in logistics and supply chain. I use an image of the prompt was, give me a picture of a of a bustling port, ocean port, from the perspective of the stevedore. All right, it’s beautiful. It’s this picture. It’s from the inside of the crane. The port is a giant ship, sunny day. It’s a beautiful picture. And when I do, when I do the training on image generation, I say, look, here’s the thing. Stevedores, when they’re in the crane, are not paid to be taking pictures. They’re paid to move freight. So probably this image that I have, the picture does not exist anywhere on the planet, but it was the. Image that I needed and I wanted, I was able to design the exact image that I want. I mean, that’s, you know. So you got images, you got music, you got editing, you get video, videos, you know. And watching the video, evolution of video closely, especially with an election going on, because there are some dangers to it, but, but, yeah, it’s everywhere you you go and typically, and this is the advice I give, typically, any, any of these platforms have a free version and a monthly paid version. So I say, try as many of the free versions as you can see. What works for you Brandon might, might be different than what works for me. Try the free version if you like it. Move, you know, then think about the other one. So there’s, there’s a handful of them that I have gone and gone and bought the paid version because I knew I was going to get that much, that much use out of it. But it’s hard to, it’s hard to navigate all of this. So, so I’m going to keep trying as best as I can to get good information into people’s hands. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 40:55
that’s great. As we start wrapping things up here, I wanted to ask you for a chamber listening, who wants to take their chamber up to the next level? Imagine that’s why most of them do listen. What kind of tip or action item might you share with them to try to accomplish that goal?

Craig Turner 41:10
Sure, and there’s two. I give two answers to that. One of one is the obvious one, because we just spent all this time talking about AI. You have to be a leader in AI. And again, there’s, there’s the practical aspect of it, where you can train people, and they’re guaranteed there’s someone in your membership that does you know that would do an AI training for you? Get it on your calendar. If you haven’t already, I’ll do it. And if you if I would go ahead and do it. And if you don’t call me and I’ll set one up for you, it’s fine. We run regular ones anyway, that we just kind of lump chambers on to so that they don’t have to host their own. And it can be thought leadership. That’s where, you know, educate your executive your president, your executive director, on AI, bring in some experts. Run a run a panel. Run a thought leadership panel, just to kind of position yourself your brand near AI, because it’s going to be so important and it’s not going away. I mean, that’s, I mean, I always when people think it’s a fad or it’s going to, you know, it’s eventually going to tap out. I mean, Volkswagen put chatgpt in their 2024, models. All right, it’s a unit for voice chat GBT. I mean, it’s not, it’s not going anywhere. It’s only going to get stronger and more important. So that’s the one. That’s the obvious piece of advice to sum up our our conversation. The other one that I’d say is, I, you know, I do believe that it’s going to becoming more and more important for chambers to get granular, more granular with their delivery of member value in that companies are trying to and again, this is especially as we get into the millennials and the and the Gen Z. If you don’t have a teenager right now, or a college student, they like to know why before they make a decision, they just do so you’re gonna have to answer that question as they get into leadership positions, because they’re gonna because they’re gonna want to know why they’re spending, you know, an hour at your committee meeting. They’re gonna know why they spent $350 on the on the membership, and it’s a lot of work to explain that to a lot. You know, you’ve got chambers with four or five people taking care of 1200 members. It’s a lot, it’s a lot to do. That’s why we created the AI platform to help to help do that, but, but unfortunately, that’s what it is. And even back when during the recession, when I told that story, it was largely the small and medium sized businesses. But now I’m seeing more and more. It’s the bigger businesses too. I’ve been giving you $25,000 a year for the past 40 years, but a new CFO comes in. Why are we giving you $25,000 a year? What are we getting for it? You got to be ready. You got to be ready with an answer for that question. Yeah, for sure.

Brandon Burton 43:51
Well, Craig, this question maybe may have an obvious answer, but as we look to the future, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Craig Turner 44:00
I Well, yeah, I think the purpose is is even more important now I said companies are busier and busier than ever, which means they have less and less time to do things other than run their business and and try to succeed and thrive. The chambers fill a role there in being the, being that voice of business, and being the source of education, even what I say I’m doing on the AI stuff, you know, the chamber to learn everything. That’s the the asking me of a chamber, you have to know, you have to be able to answer a question on any topic somebody, somebody brings you, so you have that body of knowledge that you can share with your members who don’t have time to get the knowledge on their own. I think that’s a critic. That’s a critical piece of it. You know, the other thing is, there is it’s becoming, I’m seeing it become more competitive, and I think chambers have to rise to that occasion. And it’s not that, it’s not chambers competing against other chambers. We’re going to. Region versus a county or whatever, but it’s you’ve got your chamber, and then you got this group over here, and this business association and this group and this group and this group, and everywhere I go, everybody talks about this, this challenge, the two ways to do it are to be better and stronger and basically take the other ones out because you’re because they just can’t compete with you. And the other is to be collaborative. I’d love to see collaboration. For so many years, it was okay. I’d collaborate with I’d love to collaborate you on an event, but who gets the $15 ticket and who gets the $100 sponsorship? No, just collaborate. Figure all. That’s the other if I if you bring a sponsor, it’s yours. If you bring sponsor of yours collaborate, cast a wider net. And I think, but I think that that existence in a increasingly competitive environment is is huge, and you have to be thoughtful about it. And you know, back to the AI thing, seminars, webinars are chambers, bread and butter, educational seminars and webinars. Well, you need to bear in mind that most topics, I can go to chatgpt and get an answer on anything I want in 30 seconds. So you have to up your game on these educational topics in that it’s not just about giving information. It’s about providing a perspective and a path forward and something where, where somebody’s going to go spend an hour with you. You want them leaving saying, Yeah, that was an hour well spent. So I think that kind of thinking is really going to be important as chambers exist in this competitive environment, but I don’t think they’ve ever been more important before than they are right now.

Brandon Burton 46:37
Yeah, that’s great. I love the answers, Craig, I wanted to give you a chance for anyone listening who may want to reach out and connect with you, possibly have you do a training for them or work with you somehow. What would be the best way for you to point people to connect and reach out to connect with you? Sure,

Craig Turner 46:55
best. There’s two things I’m as you’ve heard several times during this interview, I’m very heavy on LinkedIn, so you can get me on Messenger. If you do want to reach out, connect with me. Don’t follow me. Connect with me. If you follow me, I’m going to turn around and send you a connection request anyway, on LinkedIn and Facebook, I have AI for Chambers, exclusive groups where I share content and and prompt ideas. I set them up to kind of be like my Hey, I had this idea today, and I’ll share it so but get me on LinkedIn. Otherwise, very easy it’s Craig@Momentumhub.ai if you want to email me directly. I mean, I’m an email guy, still.

Brandon Burton 47:42
Very good. We will get that in the show notes for this episode make it easy for people to connect with you and learn more about what you have to offer and how you can help elevate their chamber. Awesome. Craig, this has been great having you on the show. I’m grateful for your insights and perspective that you brought, and I hope it helps move the needle, and especially as we look at the workforce issues among chambers and communities, to be able to help fill those gaps and to help chambers stay relevant as they move along into the future. But this has been great, and I really appreciate you. Craig.

Craig Turner 48:14
Well, thanks, thanks. Thanks to you too, Brandon. I do appreciate it. And but you know, best of luck with the Chamber chat podcast. I love it. You could tell I love this stuff, though. So

Brandon Burton 48:27
If you are a chamber professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple podcast, Google podcasts or Spotify. When you subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast new episodes will show up in your podcast app each week as they are released. If you’re finding value in this podcast, please leave us a rating and a review in iTunes. But most importantly, please share Chamber Chat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry.

Craig Turner 48:57
Hey, everyone. This is Craig Turner, founder of Momentum AI, I want to give a great big shout out, and thank you to Brandon Burton and the Chamber Chat Podcast for an incredible conversation today we touched on something game changing for chambers. That’s our Momentum AI platform. It’s designed to create customized, personalized strategies for your members, showing them how to make the most out of their membership with you. Whether you’re looking to boost engagement, retention or growth, this platform is your new secret weapon, and for all you Chamber Chat listeners, we’ve got a special offer just for you when you sign up for Momentum AI, use the code Chamber Chat C, H, A M, B, E R, C, H, A T, to get 10% off your initial subscription no matter what level you choose. Let’s harness the power of AI to supercharge your chamber and your members, head over to www.momentumhub.ai to learn more and get started today.

Greater Phoenix Chamber-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Todd Sanders

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

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

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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist Series. And our guest for this episode is Todd Sanders. Todd is the President and CEO of the Greater Phoenix Chamber in Arizona, and was named that that role in 2009 before assuming his current role, Todd represented the interests of businesses and community at the Arizona State legislator and Phoenix City Hall as Vice President of Public Affairs. In that role, he enhanced the Chamber’s position as a statewide leader in immigration policy, initiative reform and pro business tax policy. Prior to joining the chamber, Todd acted as a Research and Policy Analyst for the Arizona House of Representatives, serving several standing committees in the areas of taxation, Environment, Energy, state trust, land, counties, municipalities and international trade. He also acted as a liaison to the Arizona Mexico commission on behalf of the house represent, House of Representatives, and currently serves as board president for the Arizona Mexico commission. Todd is a native of Bogota, Colombia. Holds a Bachelor of Science in political science from Northern Arizona University, and he and his wife have a son and live in Phoenix, Arizona, Todd, I’m excited to have you with us today here on chamber chat podcast. Want to start by saying congratulations to you and your team, what a honor and accomplishment, and want to allow you a chance to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better, you

Todd Sanders 2:45
bet. Well, thank you for that, for that introduction. I think if my mom were here, she would be certainly proud, but I certainly embarrassed by all of those. Although those details, thank you for taking the time. I can’t tell you how thrilled we are here in Phoenix to be in the running for a chamber of the year. It is, is a tremendous honor. And as soon as we were notified, the whole chamber was, was just overjoyed. So really appreciate the opportunity. In terms of about things about me, usually, I usually tell people Sure, I was born in Bogota, Colombia, kicked out for bad behavior, but, but the I will tell you something that I think probably 99% of people don’t know. So you mentioned that my name is Todd Sanders recently, well, I shouldn’t say recently. About three or four years ago, we were at a family reunion, and somehow our family tree came up, and we mentioned my brothers and I were saying, Well, we know that my mom’s side was from Scotland, and dad’s side was from Italy. And someone piped up and said, Italy, you know, what are you talking about? There’s no Italian blood here. And and we were just we were so confused that dad’s not with us anymore. And what we learned was, what actually happened is, generations ago, a we actually my our great, great grandfather migrated from, I believe, Mexico into the United States, settled in California and and at that time, decided that probably would be more advantageous to have a more Anglo Saxon sounding name. So he and some friends who sort of came up with this idea, put some names into a hat, and they drew, and my great, great grandfather drew the name Sanders previously. And I guess, I guess you could say, currently, our name had been Sepulveda. So actually, you’re talking to Todd Sepulveda, but by accident, or, I guess, because, of a set of circumstances, Todd Sanders, so something that most people don’t know about me and then, and of course, Todd Sepulveda doesn’t really roll off the tongue. That’s

Brandon Burton 4:47
right. I wonder if your first name would have been different if it’s

Todd Sanders 4:50
still I wonder, yeah, absolutely.

Brandon Burton 4:54
Might be talking to a whole different person. But that’s that’s interesting. I like hearing the family history. And how names change. And my last name is currently Burton, b, u r t o n. But again, his family immigrated into the states. They came from France through Canada into Maine, and at the time it was b, e r t i n, and of course, everybody’s illiterate back then, so they said the name, it got written down, b, u, r, t, O, N, and here we are still today. So yeah, it’s, that’s the way it works. That’s right. Well, tell us about the greater Phoenix chamber. That’s what we’re here for. So tell us about your your organization, size, staff, budget, scope of work, just to set the stage for us. Well,

Todd Sanders 5:38
you bet Walt, thank you for that opportunity. So we have interesting history. Unlike most of the the folks that are listening to this, this podcast nationally, where states have been around for a while, Arizona is a relatively young state. We were formed in 1912 so, so, you know, we just had our our centennial chamber was formed in 1888 so prior to statehood, some some visionary business leaders at the time, formed the Phoenix chamber, and obviously through that time, it has evolved into the organization it is today. So as of, as of now, we have about 2400 members, ranging in all sizes. Our budget is is split between two entities. There’s the chamber side and the foundation side. And when you put those two together, it’s shy of about ten million with the foundation being slightly larger. The staff, our staff is currently close to 70 and and a lot of that serves some of the needs that we’re addressing through the foundation. Yeah, in terms of programs of work, as you mentioned, I come from a policy background, so I’m I can’t get away from that. We do a lot of the state legislature. We work a lot with our city, our city council, and more and more, especially with our friends at the US Chamber, we’re doing work at the at the federal level, there’s also an economic development component to the work we do now. Like, like most of us, we aren’t an attractor. We have a statewide attractor and a county attractor of businesses into the valley. But certainly, as as most chambers do when we get businesses come into town. How do we keep them here? How do we keep them growing? And then finally, as an outgrowth of that work, there’s a workforce component to it, and that’s really where the foundation comes into play,

Brandon Burton 7:30
yeah, but I’m glad to hear that you guys have a foundation. I know that’s kind of the trajectory that we see. Chambers are encouraging chambers to go to be able to really further the work that they have to do. But so typically, on these chamber the year finalist episodes, what I like to do is focus the majority of our time on the programs that were submitted on your chamber the year application, and dive into kind of the origins for those and and the impact that they’re making in your community. And we’ll, we’ll dive into those programs for the greater Phoenix chamber, as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right. Todd, we are back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’ll we’ll dive into the pro. Programs that were submitted on your chamber of the year application. I understand that the first kind of scope or program of work will say, covers several programs, kind of in one container, we’ll say, but please introduce that to us. Let us know what those programs are, and again, what the origins and the reason it kind of how this developed?

Todd Sanders 10:25
Well, thank you for that. You’re right. The first, the first set of programs, is sort of under one category. And I think about it as sort of this idea of belonging, my my philosophy, my leadership philosophy really revolves around an abundance model, which, of course, isn’t isn’t blind to the fact that we have to compete, but there’s also a lot of room for us to work together or to bring people in. And so one of those is really revolves around our strategy relating to helping small and mid sized business understand what the road to diversity and inclusion looks like for their companies. Large companies really don’t have a big challenge with implementing these kinds of programs within their within their organizations, but small and mid sized companies tend to have challenges with that. And this goes back eight years ago, July 7, by the way. July 7, 2016 was the day that this all started for me. I had a member of my board, Frank Reed, African American gentleman, who called me and said, Todd, I need to go to lunch. And can we, I need to get on your calendar today, which I thought was was interesting. But we did it. And he and our chair, we sat down and and he said, today in my hometown of Dallas, five police officers were shot for a race related reason, and we can’t let that happen in Phoenix and and part of that is because we’re not we’re not bringing people in, we’re not having conversations, and we’re not really thinking about belonging here. And he said, I need the chamber to engage and but that that lunch, we said, All right, we’re going to do that. And that was the start of something, I think, really impactful, which which began with this, this toolkit that, for instance, our for our friends in the Billings Montana chamber are using as well, where we’re giving small, midsize businesses a roadmap just to start to bring people in and have conversations about how we can all belong, and we built up a toolkit. One of the first things that that occurred was that we decided that staff’s not going to build this thing out. My members of my executive committee built this thing out with with help from us and more of logistical support. And the product, I think, was remarkable. Now it’s in the second iteration, and and and the discussion at that time was, well, what do we do with this? And we immediately decided we’re not monetizing it, we’re giving it away. And you can imagine my sales people. We’re thrilled with this idea, but we felt like it really important for us to learn from what happened in Dallas, and this is before, certainly George Floyd and all these other things. But how do we start bringing people in and just talk to each other, right? And so we decided we would give it away, whether you remember or not, we want to help people in, and we’ve we formed a committee that really what we do is we help businesses along the way when the way they have want to have conversations about, how do you include people? And how do we, how do we make that a part of what we do every day? That’s the toolkit that we use. So that’s one part of it. There were some existing programs that really got wrapped into this. We have an Athena program, which I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with, with the Athena international program, and that’s really how we look at women leaders in our community, that balance, obviously, leadership positions. They also are mentors, and they’re making change in their community. And we’ve had this for 38 years now. It’s a really important part of who we are. There’s also a bit a business, a Women’s Alliance, where we’re bringing women leaders together on a monthly basis, and we really promote what they’re doing. They They network with each other, they lift people up. And it’s a remarkable, remarkable program. Never leave one of these programs without feeling inspired and and really wondering how you didn’t know about this person in our community. And then finally, our Valley young professionals. We, when I became CEO, I really made it a goal to make this a program that was going to be worthwhile, not just something where we were checking the box. And so we really thought about, how do we make this impactful? And part of that, obviously, is giving people coming into their careers an opportunity to really understand what it’s like to serve on a board. What’s a nonprofit all about, what’s your role, what’s the what’s the role of the organization? And and it was working really well. We had really strong leaders, which I think is part of the key, right? But then I there was something was missing, because they there was always this idea that there’s the vyp board, value professional board, and then there’s sort of, quote, unquote big board. And I thought, why do we Why do we have that? And going back to this idea of abundance, I said. Let’s do this. I want to make the leadership so the Chair and the Vice Chair, I want to make them full fledged members of our board, and that means they’re voting members. They’re not junior members that are observed, but they’re full fledged members of the board. That really sort of changed the way young people were looking at this committee and engaging in this committee. Now, what’s interesting about it, you know, how you so you’re thinking about influencing and really bringing up a sort of a set of people as we started to incorporate them into the board, we started feeling significant benefits from having completely different point of view on the board, so much so that at our board retreats, we actually invite the the vyp board, the full board, onto our into our into our retreats, along with our foundation, because they’re adding so much to the conversation. So really, this, this whole idea, and all of these programs are, we’re all wrapped around this, this thought that there’s, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of abundance out there, and how do we start to share that, and how do we start to bring people up? And as a consequence, it’s made us stronger, it’s made us healthier, and it’s and I think in a lot of ways, it’s the reason why we’re here today, talking to you, because that’s the kind of thing that really starts to move a community forward. Right

Brandon Burton 16:21
now, when you think of inclusion and making sure people feel welcomed, I like to think if somebody walks into a room and they don’t feel like they belong there, whether it’s whatever group, you know, segmentation you want to, you know, put the focus on, if they don’t feel like they belong there, they’re out, you know, they’re not going to stay, they’re not going to come back, they’re not going to engage. They’re not going to go to the next level with engagement with your organization. So it’s so important to be able to really highlight these areas, to make sure that people from all different walks of life as they come in, that this is a place for everyone in your community to be involved.

Todd Sanders 17:04
You Ben

Brandon Burton 17:06
with a thought, do you, I know, unfortunately, dei gets kind of a political spin put on it. So how’s the approach that you guys have? Or have you gotten any you know, received any feedback from people on the outside saying, what’s the chamber doing getting involved with these things, and how do you address that with them?

Todd Sanders 17:26
You know, I haven’t gotten the the angry emails that I’ve that I’ve heard about, and I think part of that is because we really look at it from a practical standpoint. I’ll give you an example Frank. Frank read the gentleman that I talked about, you know, provided such an important example, and we’re seeing this, for instance, today in Phoenix, there are literally more jobs than people, so we’re having to do everything that we can to really fill these, these critical slots in our economy. One of the things that that this applies to is the workforce side, obviously, and his story was that they had a really high level position in a company that they were trying to fill. And they they brought they were thinking, Alright, we need more women leaders. They brought in these five. I mean, these were top notch, Ivy League type folks that any one of them would have been incredible for this position. And so they brought them in. They did these interviews. And you know how these, these things work, it’s not generally one person, it’s probably a panel of folks and and they all five women, declined the position in succession, and finally, Frank decided to call a couple of them, and what they said was, you know, it seems like a great company, a lot of opportunity there, but I don’t see myself represented there. There was just a bunch of bunch of men on this in this panel, and I didn’t think I belong there. And for him, it was a really interesting wake up call. And said in the sense that if you want to bring people on board, make sure that they feel like they have a place there. And I think when we talk to companies about how you’re going to look for this top talent, as we’re thinking about $40 billion worth of semiconductor dollars coming into Arizona, and what’s going to be needed in terms of top talent, you got to make sure that that people feel like they got a place at the table if you’re looking to fill these really critical roles. So I think for us, it’s been looking at this from a practical perspective. Same thing goes for the young professionals, the when I think about way back when, when we started this group, there was one particular person who who was their their chair at the time, and she was a complete standout, just amazing. Went through that process, left the vyp group because she’d sort of graduated out and was chair, and had done everything that could be done. Then she became a member of the board through her company, and two years ago, she was my chair. She was the chair of our board, and an incredibly catalytically or who brought so much to the table. So I think when people start to see this as not a political exercise, but this idea that all we’re doing is making sure. Sure that there’s room at the table for everybody. You tend to win.

Brandon Burton 20:03
Yeah, that goes back to your, your thought on abundance, right? There’s room for everybody, and let’s, let’s show them. I, I’ve heard it, and I think I’ve shared it before on the podcast, but when you walk into a room and you see people gathered together, they tend to be in in a circle, right, talking to each other. And that to be inclusive. Instead of a circle, create more of a horseshoe, right? Leave it open, let people in be able to let them feel welcome and like they belong there.

Todd Sanders 20:27
Well, it’s true. And I think, you know, part of that is came from this idea. You mentioned, I was from Colombia, and it’s odd, because when I’m in the States, I always feel like there’s a part of me that’s that doesn’t belong, because it’s true, right? I’m, you know, people you were born somewhere else, and when I’m in Colombia, people like automatic people like, automatically think I’m

Brandon Burton 20:45
American, because, yeah,

Todd Sanders 20:47
I don’t use the simple but a name down there, and so it’s an odd thing to it, so it gives you a sense for what that’s like. But, but, yeah, it’s been, it’s been really rewarding in terms of how far this has gone and the impact that it’s had, not only on the chamber, but in in organizations throughout the Valley and in people, yeah, oh,

Brandon Burton 21:07
that’s great. Let’s shift gears a bit into the other program that was submitted on your application. And if you could tell us what that is and what the origins and the purpose was behind that,

Todd Sanders 21:19
well, you mentioned the foundation, and I’m really glad you did. And I’m encouraging other other chambers to certainly look at foundations. And I will say that we call it the 10 year overnight success story. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 21:31
it takes most are right 100%

Todd Sanders 21:34
I’d love to say it was two years. But, you know, a lot of that work was was built on, you know, the things we had done in the past, and when I mentioned the the Retention and Expansion work that we did, what, what I assumed, when we started talking to businesses, that they would tell me, Todd, the big issues here in Arizona are, are taxes and regulation and and as we talked to business leaders, none of them said that, Which was really shocking to me, and this is before workforce was was cool. They all said we don’t have the qualified talent that we need today and and that was a big wake up call for us. Part of the part of that also was a visit we had with a what would be a fortune 200 company locally that was moving about 200 jobs that paid six figures outside of Arizona because they couldn’t find enough people who could pass the series seven exam. And okay, hold on. We’re the we’re the fifth largest city in the country. That doesn’t seem possible, right? So we figured out very quickly that there was a role for us there. We needed to do more in this space, and so that’s how we got into workforce. And as we as we had a few years under our belt with workforce, it became really clear that we there wasn’t a good method or a good pathway for kids in high schools looking to college and career either or right. I know it’s black and white, but it’s not, it’s college and or career, because they’re interchangeable in some ways. And so I’ll tell you the story real quick. We decided we really need to learn. And so there’s a really great program in Nashville, and kudos to to the Nashville chamber and all the work that they do out there a program in Nashville where they have these Academy an academy model. And so we took a group out to Nashville, and we said, we want to learn about this. And by happenstance, the Phoenix union board actually ended up there as well. We had no idea they were going to be there. We bumped into each other, and it was weird, because we didn’t know each other really well. It was a lot of distrust. Why is the chamber here? You know, what is this board doing here? And we started talking. Go figure, right? We started talking. And by the third day, we were kind of a unified group. And we left there saying, we don’t know this is our model, but, but if, maybe, if we decided to work together, maybe there’s something here for us. And so we did. We decided that we would start with one school, and what we would do is we would see how we could create pathway opportunities for kids in high schools, especially in Title One high schools. And so that was, that was a about four years ago. Three years ago, we started with our first school and and district, and that started to grow over time, and it is something that now has grown to 20 high schools in Arizona and 1000s of kids through that work. One of the things that we we found, among other things, was that a lot of these kids had the the skills, they had the ability, they certainly had the right to engage in some sort of dual enrollment opportunity, but they weren’t doing it, partially because they didn’t know it existed, and mostly because they didn’t have the funds to pay for the dual enrollment. So this is what I love about this sort of project, because it engaged the. Foundation that also engage the chamber. Remember, I told you, we do a lot of the at the legislature. So last year, we got together with some of our partners and and petitioned the legislature for an appropriation that would allow our our kids, our Title One kids, to get at least six credit hours, usually 12 credit hours of dual enrollment before they graduated. It was an interesting issue because it was, believe it or not, bipartisan. There was both sides. It was weird, right? This was a good idea. It was, it was odd, but it was a great, a great thing to sort of be curious about the this bill passed, and now there’s an opportunity for these kids to not have to worry about the financial barrier and think about what this will mean going into into college. You know, if, if they have these 12 credit hours, it means they’re probably going to continue on into the community college system, get a get a two year degree, or a four year degree in industries or in areas where there’s a huge demand in Arizona. So that first year we did it, we saw 40% increase in dual enrollment in 20 in 20 High School. So a significant number. This year we’re seeing a smaller increase. And we had to ask ourselves, what’s going on here? We obviously have a lot of kids out there that haven’t seen this opportunity. What we found was, and probably what we’re seeing in a lot of communities around our country, where we’re actually have a shortage of teachers who are certified in dual enrollment. So we were able to get funds together, and we’re actually providing incentives for teachers to get certified. They have to do that. They have to pay to get certified. So we’re helping them get certified. Our goal is to get get them certified through the system, and then next year, bring those numbers up again. But it’s an interesting sort of process, from where we started with us in Nashville, looking at how we can work together, to today, looking at very specific numbers and the families that we’re helping on a generational basis.

Brandon Burton 27:02
Yeah, well, that goes back to, you know, raising the tide, you know, raises all ships as well. So in both of these programs, I see examples of that. So with this one, you’re focused on the employers making sure they have the pipeline coming in, but in doing, in focusing on that, you’re enhancing the life of these young people going through high school and looking to the that next step in their their life, their, you know, work or college, or both and, or both, right?

Todd Sanders 27:28
I agree. And then the schools,

Brandon Burton 27:30
the schools are being elevated, and the teachers are being elevated. So all around it’s great. They

Todd Sanders 27:35
really are and, and I’ll tell you, you know, a big part of this was internships, right along with a dual enrollment opportunity. And you can imagine what the reaction is from a lot of businesses when you tell them we want to live and have some seniors come in and do an internship, especially in areas like healthcare or or advanced manufacturing, like Honeywell. And I’ll use Honeywell as the example. They were very polite, and they said no, and we finally convinced them, three years ago to take three of our kids. And they said, okay, they have to be over 18, so they’re in their spring semester. We’ll take three. Let us see what happens. They took three, and at the end of it, they said, You know what these kids are, they’re pretty good. We’re gonna hire them. Awesome. So they hired these kids last year. They took six, and they erased the 18, the 18 year old rule. Well, let me fast forward to today. How many do you think they’re taking?

Brandon Burton 28:32
I I’m gonna say at least 12, if you just keep doubling, right? Or is 24 How many years is this now? This will be the third year. Third years, I’m gonna, I’m gonna guess 1288,

Todd Sanders 28:45
we’re taking 88 of our kids now. Here’s the here’s the awesome. I’m gonna bring this all back to where I started, in terms of abundance. All right, so here’s, here’s the story. So earlier last month, we met with the representative money well, when he was telling us that they’re gonna increase to 88 and he said, I need to tell you what happened in that first cohort of kids, there was one kid who was on the bubble, looks like he wasn’t going to graduate. He wasn’t engaged. High School just wasn’t his thing. And the school and Honeywell decided, let’s let’s see what happens. Well, you know what happened, right? Honeywell hired him at the end because it really seemed to work. Well, guess what? Today? Well, not today. Last month, he brought his he bought a house for his family. Wow, yeah. I mean, think about that as a kid who’s on the bubble, probably not going to graduate all of a sudden, he’s got this incredible job of Honeywell. And today, I mean, my kid’s 20, he’s not buying a house for his family. This kid just bought a house for his family. That’s not political, that’s amazing. How do we start to create an abundance mentality in our community and really create opportunity for everybody, including Honeywell, by the way,

Brandon Burton 29:54
yes, wow. That just blows my mind. The 88 interns now that great story, great. Success, yeah,

Todd Sanders 30:01
a lot of those. Yeah, I

Brandon Burton 30:03
bet we can go on for a couple hours trying to some great stories. And I’d love

Todd Sanders 30:08
to say that, you know, kudos to the chamber, no, kudos to those companies. CVS just did 20. Yeah? So it’s great to, it’s great to see that impact, and it’s great to see companies stepping up like that, yeah,

Brandon Burton 30:19
well, and for those who do go the route of higher education after high school. It’s a huge help to have those dual credits going into college and university, and being able to kind of have that head start. And my son just graduated, and he got it, got out of high school with 30 college credits, like, that’s awesome going into as a sophomore, right? So it’s

Todd Sanders 30:41
you think about the financially for you. I mean, that’s yeah, you just saved

Brandon Burton 30:45
a year. Yeah? I recognize it, yes, yeah. Well, Todd, I like asking, especially as a chamber of the year finalist, for listeners who are tuning in, what kind of tip or action item might you have to share with them as they look to take their chamber up to the next level?

Todd Sanders 31:06
Well, I, you know, I’ll go back to the 10 years ago when we decided that we wanted to, we needed to raise some money to make this happen. I think our goal was, was, was about a million dollars and and that was, that’s a big number. It’s a big number today. And as we were talking to business leaders, I think there’s, there’s, there’s, there’s always a lot of skepticism about a new program, and you’re coming here to help. And we hear this all the time. And I think one of the things that we said that I think made a big difference when we when we made our pitch, I said, Look, something in what I’ve just talked about is going to go wrong. Something’s not going to work. I promise you that is going to happen. But I’m also going to promise you that we’re going to take that, we’re going to learn from it, and then we’re going to pivot, and we’re going to make sure it does work. And I think we’ve, we’ve gotten comfortable with being uncomfortable, and that’s in all parts of our chamber. I mean, it’s so easy to say, I don’t know, that’s kind of scary. Well, we maybe we tried that before, or that’s never going to work, or we’ve always done it this way. We do it too, but if you give yourself permission to fail, you’re going to succeed.

Brandon Burton 32:18
Yeah, I love that. If you give yourself permission to fail, you’re going to succeed. It’s that’s a t shirt. That’s a t shirt, right? Yeah, so,

Todd Sanders 32:26
but you fail a lot and and that that’s what makes us successful. It’s

Brandon Burton 32:31
right. That’s right. You learn, right? You bet. Well, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward.

Todd Sanders 32:41
Well, you know, I really feel like chambers are in such a good place right now. I feel like, you know, we’re looking at ourselves in a way that is probably different than we had even 10 years ago. You mentioned foundations. I think there’s a renewed emphasis on how we are really the heart of our economies. And I think probably covid was terrible. We wouldn’t want to go through it again. But I think covid really gave us a moment to really understand the importance that chambers serve in our communities. We are at the heart of our economies and our communities. And that certainly was reinforced during that time, and I think it gave us a new sense of what we need to be and how we need to do things, and how we talk about ourselves. We are economic developers. That’s chambers are the original economic developers. I don’t care how you slice it, that’s how the community sees us now. I think that’s tremendous, but we’re also taking that a step further and looking at things that we hadn’t traditionally looked at, like, like education, like foundation work. And I gotta tell you, I love this industry and and I’m so proud to be a part of it.

Brandon Burton 33:53
I love that, yes, every chamber is an economic development. Doesn’t matter what the city contract says you are involved in developing the economy in your community. Well, Todd, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you and learn how you guys are doing things there in Phoenix, and maybe dig in a little deeper. Where would you point them? Absolutely

Todd Sanders 34:17
Happy. Happy to help on that side as well. You can also, you can always go to our website, PhoenixChamber.com a lot of information there about all the programs we talked about, including a few others that I didn’t my email address is tsanders@phoenixchamber.com so feel free to reach out there as well. And then, certainly if you want to have a conversation, 602-495-6460, 495-6460,

Brandon Burton 34:43
that’s perfect. We will get that in our show notes for this episode too, to make it easy to reference and have people pull it up and find you there. But Todd, this has been great having you on Chamber Chat Podcast. I wish you and your team the best of luck in Dallas as Chamber of the Year, and keep up the great work. Work you guys are making a huge impact.

Todd Sanders 35:01
Well, thank you. We will look forward to seeing you

Brandon Burton 35:05
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Greater Winston Salem, Inc.-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Mark Owens

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

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

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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist Series. And our guest for this episode is Mark Owens. Mark is the President and CEO of the Greater Winston Salem, Inc. Mark has over 14 years experience building communities through economic development. He was named president CEO of Winston Salem chamber, now greater Winston Salem Inc in 2017 and previously served as president and CEO of the greater Greer chamber in South Carolina. Mark is actively involved in the community in Winston Salem and forcep County, serving on the board of directors at Novant Health Forces Medical Center and the Piedmont Triad partnership, among others. Nationally, he serves on the board of directors for ACCE. He’s a graduate of Presbyterian College and the US Chamber Institute for organizational management, and he holds his CCE designation. Mark is a native of Charleston, South Carolina, and he is and his wife melody, have a son named Luke and a golden doodle named boots mark. Welcome to the chamber tap podcast. First of all, congratulations to you and your team. It’s a great accomplishment to be named as a chamber the year finalist. I’d love for you to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Mark Owens 2:29
Yeah, thank you, Brandon. I really appreciate what you do for our industry. And having the opportunity to be on this podcast, it’s great to to meet everybody through through this platform, and looking forward to meeting others in person coming up soon. We’re really proud of greater Winston to be one of the finalists, and really honored to be a part of this recognition. And it’s been a great a great process, a great journey as a team. And we’ll look forward to sharing a little bit about that with you today. A little bit about me. Fun fact, wow. I think maybe when I was at Presbyterian College, I played soccer there and was able to get an internship at this thing called a chamber of commerce, which I had never heard of before. And so I started as an intern, and then actually worked part time for a year while I was in school at the Chamber of Commerce in Lawrence County, South Carolina. And so work based learning is near and dear to my heart and provided an opportunity for me to to discover an industry I never even knew about as a young person. So internship is is probably that fun fact about me being in a chamber to start off?

Brandon Burton 3:35
Yeah, that’s awesome. You’re sort of a product of the programs that are being modeled at your chamber now. And that’s a that’s awesome. A lot of people find chamber work by accident, but that’s right, that’s about as intentional as you can be doing an internship. So that’s that is a fun fact. Well, tell us a little bit about greater Winston, Salem, Inc, just size, staff, budget, scope of work to set the stage for our discussion.

Mark Owens 4:05
Yeah, absolutely. So we are here in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and greater Winston Salem, Inc was originally the greater Winston Salem Chamber of Commerce. Technically, we are 138 years old. Our chamber existed before Winston and Salem became one city, they were two separate cities. So our chamber claims a little bit of responsibility for bringing those cities together 100 years ago, but our organization is greater Winston Salem inquire the combination of the Chamber of Commerce and the economic development organization for the community. That was a merger that took place in 2019 I moved to Winston Salem in December of 2017, and in 2019 our boards voted to merge economic development back into the chamber of commerce and evolve our name to greater Winston Salem, Inc. Little do we know that our bylaws say our first day is literally April Fools of 2020. And so during covid, I was the only person in the office on the first day of this new, newly named organization. But our team is really focused on three main things. Our vision statement for 2030 which is to be the top mid sized city in the southeast, to be a more equitable community, and to be the best place to raise a family. And we really shape everything we do around that. We have 16 team members here at greater Winston, Salem Inc, about a $3 million budget, and when we started, we were at about 1.7 million. So we’ve had a lot of growth, not just economic development, but specifically workforce and utilizing grant opportunities, which I know we’ll talk about here in a few minutes, but we have a great board, a 29 member board of directors, a community that was built on textile and tobacco, and we’re evolving into biotech, life science and advanced manufacturing being a key component of our membership base. We have 848 members, so we are a growing community, but really tied to the fabric of Winston sale with our rich history, and it’s a great place to be. That’s awesome. Yeah, I

Brandon Burton 6:08
love these communities that have such a rich history. To be able to go back 138 years and be able to see the those beginnings, and see how the communities evolve, see how the economy has evolved, technologies, all these different things, and to be able to be there for the growth and and championing, championing, championing the cause and change, right? So in these chamber, the year finalist episodes, I really like focusing the majority of our time on the programs that were submitted, and your chamber the year application and kind of how they came to be, the history leading up to them, the impact they’re making in your community. And we’ll dive into those programs as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right. Mark, we’re back. Let’s let’s jump into the first program that was submitted on your your chamber the year application, if you can tell us what it is and kind of its origins and the momentum that it’s built over time. Yeah,

Mark Owens 8:48
I’m going to start with our Career Ready youth part of our program, and that’s something that’s been really a key component to our community. And what we do at greater with cell make you heard earlier that I was a former intern, work based learning is is really important to me, but our organization has been involved with working with our young people, specifically K through 12, for a long time now, since the the late 90s, we have been contracted by our K through 12 school system to do career readiness and career exploration. We also used to do some third grade reading, coaching, coordination, but since our school district has taken that in house, we’ve expanded what we do as we work on really feeling that start of the funnel of talent pipeline. We know by talking with our business community that access to top talent is a key factor for community and economic development for all of our communities, not just for today, but for tomorrow. And being able to get our community businesses to buy into our goals of being the top, mid sized city, that means we have to retain and prepare our young people for this emerging, evolving economy that we sit in our office. Sits in a factory that used to make cigarettes, and now there’s scientists in here with us doing research on how to regrow organs. And just that evolution of the economy of Winston Salem is why we’ve got to start preparing our young people for the work for tomorrow. So a few of the things that we do, one of which we start with our eighth and 10th graders, we call it wow. It’s called World of Work. We rent out our Coliseum or Wake Forest University, plays basketball, and every eighth grader and every 10th grader in Forsyth County comes through a career fair over a two day period. We’re talking almost 9000 students come through over those two days to see what kind of career paths are out there. We do that about a month before they sign up for CTE classes, because in our community, 99% of students that take CTE programmings Career and Technical Education graduate, as opposed to our graduation rate, which is at an all time high, at 86% so we know that career and technology technology education. And Technical Education provides a path forward in the future of the workforce. It creates more graduates, and it gets those young people ready for that next step. So after World of Work, what do we do next? We have a program called Aspire. It’s for our 11th and 12th graders. It’s paid internships, and we’ve started by focusing at our Title One schools. So those schools that have been traditionally underserved, and these students go through paid internships, $15 an hour, where we receive grants. And those grants, we reimburse the companies for paying for those young people up to $15 an hour for 100 hour internship. So we believe that these young people, you know, have an option to go work, and some are providing in, you know, for family household income. So we believe in paid internships and find ways to really encourage those young people to go explore, whether it’s at Novant Health or atrium health or hospital systems, whether it’s with our banks like truist and Bank of America, or whether it’s in small businesses or startups, we have programs where we can, we can supplement those companies that are paying for these interns and reimburse them. That program was launched, but we noticed something. We noticed that our students needed a little more preparation before they went into the workplace. So we launched our work ready certificate, where now we have a 15 hour credit contact to our credential program, where we do soft skills, mock interviews, resumes, and if they create finish those 15 hours of the credential program, they also receive a stipend where we partner with local big box retailers For Dress for Success program. So we provide them with dollars to go dress and be ready for the the internship placement that they receive. So now we have graduates going through that that are getting placed in their internship program. And we also noticed that we had some students that just needed a little extra mentorship. And that’s where senior Academy comes in, and senior Academy is for mostly for seniors and some juniors that have been identified by their guidance counselors as as maybe just needing a little extra motivation to get to graduation. So we recruit businesses, business members and individuals that want to do one on one mentorship with high school students, and we help them get over the graduation line. We have about 140 students each year, a part of senior Academy, and we’ve about a 98 to 99% graduation rate of those, one on one mentors. So we’re really looking at this career ready youth as an opportunity to look at the entire individual and say from eighth grade on that there’s a there’s a pipeline, there’s a pathway that’s clearly laid out for everybody in our community to participate, not just the individuals that have more resources. And I think that’s been really important in what we’re doing. We know our companies need this workforce of tomorrow, but we also know it’s the right thing for our community to continue to grow and develop young, talented, diverse leaders. And this program is so impactful. It’s, it’s one of our favorite things to do when we go to those graduations and those ceremonies where we see individuals get those credentials, it’s really exciting. That is

Brandon Burton 14:13
awesome. Yeah, I’ve heard of a lot of, you know, career readiness, you know, programs that chambers have done, and they’ll list a couple things, and then you kept saying, and then it leads to this, and then it leads to this, and then it leads to and I love how it’s just all packed together, and it is a roadmap that leads to success. I was curious with the Aspire, with the paid internships, are there certain business types that you’re trying to match them up with or is it open to any Chamber members that want to offer internships? Or how do you go about promoting that and putting those offerings out there?

Mark Owens 14:47
Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s open to every business in the community and all of our Chamber members. So we we really actually target companies in our retention visits. We visit with our. Top 150 employers every year, and we talk to them about their needs and ask them to participate. Of course, there’s some challenges, if in manufacturing and automotive spaces, where you have OSHA situations and safety, but we really actually want it to be, you know, what I would call those office related jobs, or those jobs that they have an interest in, like construction working in construction management or in a law firm. Our real goal is that these young people dream and hope and see what’s out there and and that they get this opportunity to be exposed to new career paths that they maybe thought weren’t attainable. We want every student to feel like they have the opportunity to have an internship and understand what it’s like to work in an office or work in management, or work at a bank or or work at a hospital. And I think one of the biggest surprises Brandon that we’ve had is that some of our young people that have done paid internships at the hospital, we’ve had 10 students at the hospital, is hired on part time to continue that after the internship, so they’ve gotten great career opportunities and jobs right off the bat, and it’s really something that we weren’t expecting to happen. But students are saying, you know, I never knew that I could work at a hospital. I didn’t think that was for me. And now there’s opportunities that open those doors and provide opportunity beyond just what they could dream. So we try to open it up for everybody, but it’s really intentional in our marketing efforts, and one on one communication, we really go ask, and we tell the company that, hey, we’re going to reimburse you. There’s no cost to you, just your time. And that’s really been a great thing to break down the barrier. And one last thing I’ll say on that Brandon, we also provide transportation. So if these young people don’t have transportation, we’ve partnered with a local, you know, what we call micro transit company, that can go pick up these young people and take them to and from their jobs. And so that’s been a barrier that we’ve been able to eliminate in this process.

Brandon Burton 16:56
That’s awesome. I love the exposure and getting these young people exposed to different career paths and opportunities and show them what’s possible, but also give them a taste of what it’s like to be in that setting. Because maybe they hate it, maybe they intern at a law office and think I don’t want to go to law school and spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars in student debt, but to be able to really set them on a course of what it is that they want to do and what they don’t want to do, I think it’s just as important, man. You

Mark Owens 17:27
took the words out of my mouth. We just talked about that this morning. We had an intern here working with us, and I said the same thing, you may find that you love it. You might might find out it’s not for you. And both things are incredibly valuable. So you’re right, it just gives the gives them an opportunity to see what’s out there and and try it before they go down that pathway. And if, if they do like it, then that’s where, you know, this second program we’ll talk about in a second kind of ties in, because we don’t want that pipeline to stop at one spot. We want to be able to help those students progress

Brandon Burton 18:01
in their careers. That’s right. Now, you guys are obviously about stacking these programs on top of each other, so let’s, let’s see where this takes us. So they graduate. You know, they’ve had these internships, they’ve got the Work Ready certificate to be ready for those internships, or dressing for success. They graduate now. What now? How do you continue them along that

Mark Owens 18:21
path? Yeah, it’s this is an area where I do hope we can improve a little bit, because there there may be some leakage in the pipeline here when when they graduate and go to school or go in the workforce, it’s hard to track where everybody goes and stay in touch, but that’s where this next program for scythe works comes into play. And what we saw is that we have a lot of organizations in our community, probably like yours, that are listening, that do workforce development or some component, but we’re not as coordinated as we could be. We, you know, you’re you’re sending somebody who’s looking for a job opportunity or more training or job interview skills or whatever it is. You may send them to two to three, four locations just to to fulfill and get all the knowledge they need. So we applied as a group to the county for for an ARPA grant through the American rescue plan act, and for what’s called for scythe works. What that is, it’s the county. It’s us. Is greater in salmon. It’s our goodwill partners. It’s our school system and our community college for site tech, the five of us are all on this grant, and it’s created a one stop workforce hub location. We physically moved our chamber office in with the career and workforce team of Forsyth Tech here in innovation quarter on Winston Salem, we share an office every Wednesdays. Walk in Wednesday people can come in any day, but we we target Wednesdays for one on one, career coaching, interview, training, access to scholarships to go to for site, tech, whatever it may be to help them access new openings. In addition to hosting seven seminars a month for the community, they’re all free of charge through the. Grant to be able to talk about re entry after maybe something that happened in the law or or stepping away to be a stay at home parent, re entering the workforce or hiring individuals with neurodiversity issues. So there’s a lot of great things that we’re doing there. We also created forsythworks nc.com, which is a one stop shop for job posting. We’re aggregating job postings that we’re seeing through indeed and other places all to one site, so somebody can go to that site say, hey, I’m interested in this job. Here’s the training that it would take. Here’s how I can go ahead and register for that training, or register for classes for SciTech or Goodwill’s offering this program. Here’s the expected salary range in that industry field. It’s really a way to kind of come alongside an individual specifically as the American rescue plan act designates qualified census tracks more underserved communities to really help and create economic mobility. That’s one thing that we’re really passionate about, is be a more equitable community, as you heard in our vision, and we believe we can do that through economic mobility. So access is key to this. So we’re doing that in English and in Spanish, and trying to make sure everybody has access to the information, the training, the skills and the tools, so that ultimately they get that career that changes their lives and their family’s lives. So we’re really, are of trying to stack, to be honest with you, we keep finding challenges, and that’s why we keep trying to add on to it. If we, if we kind of just pieced it together, we may not have it as comprehensive, and we’re not done. We want to keep growing and find new solutions, but we’re really proud of that partnership. So now we’re all working together, and everybody is on the same page, going in the same direction, and it’s creating some impact. It’s only been launched for about a year, and so we’re starting to see some great metrics come in,

Brandon Burton 21:49
awesome so I’m curious with the job posting site, the reference so it’s aggregating from all these different resources of job postings and putting into the one, one stop shop to be able to find a job in the community. Is there a certain platform you guys are using? Is it a proprietary thing? Or how are you aggregating all these different job postings? Well,

Mark Owens 22:10
you know that this one, you have people on your team that are smarter than you, so I’m not sure I’m the best. Then I can tell you, it’s an RSS feed we’re pulling mostly from indeed, but we also have in our, I think it’s a WordPress designed website to where we have a job board in there, and we give access to all of our partners to be able to enter it in. So most chambers, right, probably have job boards that your members can post on for free or for cost, or based off of a tier, we have that as well. So it’s really just kind of pulling all of that into one page. Sometimes the job will click you and take you to an indeed, posting. Sometimes it’ll take you straight to a company’s website. But it’s really designed to try to help the seeker go to one place, instead of needing to carve out and go to different sites to do that. Yeah. So

Brandon Burton 23:03
it sounds like you hire well as well.

Mark Owens 23:06
You have a great team. I can say RSS feed and WordPress. If you ask me how to do the those things, that’s not me. But I know, I know the little, really good team that makes all this possible. For sure,

Brandon Burton 23:19
absolutely. The key thing is that it works. So that’s, right, works. Yeah, that’s awesome. So I like asking, especially with you being a chamber, that you’re a finalist. I mean, you guys are kind of top of the game right now for chambers that are listening and wanting to take their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them to try to accomplish that goal?

Mark Owens 23:43
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I first want to just say our board and our staff that’s doing this amazing work together, and what it’s been really fun about this process, and I think kind of, as part of my answer to your question is we didn’t set out to go try to win an award. We tried to set out to make a difference. And I think whatever your community is facing, it’s going to be different for everybody. And so the first thing we did was go ask and listen and adapt. And I think that would be my first thing is go go together with partners and go find out what your members and your businesses are facing. We we sometimes get caught up thinking we know what our businesses and our members need, instead of listening first. So I think our first step was listening and then set out to really adapt and evolve and sell mission investments, not just transactional memberships, and really try to find a way to say, hey, we’re moving the community forward through our work, and we want you to be a part of that. So honestly, I would say, Put your head down a little bit. Go, ask. Go. Listen, it doesn’t happen overnight. We’ve been working on this. We’re honest. Were a little surprised to be a finalist. We again. We didn’t set out for for this as our goal, but the process of going through this has sharpened us even more. Has helped us put our plans together and and really audit ourselves and say, What are we doing? What are we doing? Well, what can we improve on? And I would just the last thing I would say is don’t be afraid to try something. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, you can try something again, but it’s really exciting, and I’m really thankful for ACCE, the regional associations, chamber, chat, podcast, sharing ideas, to be able to listen and find new ideas is really impactful. And I just encourage you to start by saying, we think we know what we’re doing, but let’s go ask and confirm that with our businesses and make sure we’re providing the value that they want, yeah,

Brandon Burton 25:50
and that I can appreciate. You know, the the application process, and like you said, not going out to to win an award, but the process has sharpened you to refine things, and I can see where you can look at all your programs at work and be able to almost organize them in a way that makes more sense, on a kind of a flow chart, if you will, that maybe that structure has always been there, but to see it laid out and presented in a way that makes sense, I think, really helps to get everybody on board and and, like you said, to be able to sell the mission of The Chamber and what you guys are after, rather than transactional members. So that’s very well said.

Mark Owens 26:26
Thank you. Yeah, and I just want the listeners to know, like, I worked in a smaller chamber with five people. I worked my first job was two and a half people. I was the half as an intern. I think there’s so many skills that transfer from small and larger chambers. I mean, it’s different challenges, but at the end of the day, if we all can just listen to our community members roll our sleeves up and try to get after it. And really, I know it’s hard sometimes to pause and work on your chamber instead of just in it, but I think that’s so important to step back, and this process has helped us to really, like I said, audit what we’re doing. Where are our gaps? What can we improve? And I think if you take that time to do that, those those retreats, or whatever it may be, it really sets you up for success. And your community will see that, and your businesses will will invest in you.

Brandon Burton 27:17
Yeah, I think that’s wise. So I like asking everyone I have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Mark Owens 27:29
Yeah, this is a great question, and it’s actually something that I think about a lot and read about with the horizon initiative and other things a lot, and it’s chambers are evolving. We’ve been around for a really long time, and I think we’ll be around for a really long time, but we all know that, as you know, Zoom has changed what we do. Let’s just call what it is we used to be in person all the time. You got to adapt and how you engage. And I think the future of chambers really, really is going to be focused around talent. And I really believe that networking and marketing and membership, activities and events is the bread and butter, and it’s crucial. But if we can figure out as an industry how to maximize our value as it relates to talent, attraction, retention and development, that’s an area that’s so important for our businesses across the country right now, we all know that shortage and how hard it is to do it with our own teams. Think about our businesses and what they’re facing in this if we can help solve that problem, or even just ease the tension around talent development, how can we continue to adapt? But I do you know, honestly want to it’s going to be harder and harder to get memberships. You know, companies are tighter, especially post pandemic, it’s tighter membership numbers take more effort to do. And I fully believe in selling a vision and why you’re doing things, not just what you get back for it. And I think that’s been the area that I think if our industry can continue to push forward on selling the vision and selling the balance of Community and Economic Development together, that’s where the future of successful chambers are going to go. And you know, we can’t be all things to everybody, but we can guide a community forward and try to be catalytic leaders in our community, get everybody on the same page. So it’s going to be a challenge. We’re going to be learning from each other. And can’t wait to listen to more episodes, to steal ideas from from my colleagues, for sure.

Brandon Burton 29:30
That’s right. It’s your your weekly R and D resource, right

Mark Owens 29:34
here. That’s right.

Brandon Burton 29:36
Well, Mark is as as we wrap up, I want to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who want to reach out and connect to learn more. How about about how you guys are doing things? Where would you point them? What would be the best way for them to reach out and connect? Yeah, I

Mark Owens 29:51
would be honored to connect just when, when you email or LinkedIn message, we know I’m going to have questions for you too. So prepare for a two way conversation. But it’s Mark Owens, markowens@winstonsalem.com or I’m on LinkedIn as Mark Owens with Greater Winston Salem Inc, those are the two I’m probably monitor the closest, and would love to reach out, connect and and really appreciate the opportunity to share what our team and our communities doing. I love this industry as somebody who’s been in it since an intern, and hopefully we can continue to to open the doors for future people to come in and be a part of this. But look forward to connecting

Brandon Burton 30:33
absolutely I’ll I’ll get that in our show notes for this episode make it easy to find and and shoot that email or click that LinkedIn link and connect with you, but Mark, this has been great having you on the podcast again. Congratulations to you and your team. I wish you guys the best of luck in Dallas as chamber of the year.

Mark Owens 30:52
Thanks, Brandon. Appreciate being with you. If

Brandon Burton 30:56
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The State Chamber of Oklahoma-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Chad Warmington & Brent Skarky

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

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

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You’re joining us today for a special episode in our 2024 ACCE Chamber of the Year Finalist Series. And our guests for this episode are Chad Warmington and Brent Skarkey. Chad has a rich history with the State Chamber of Oklahoma, where he serves as the President and CEO Since 2020. Under his leadership, the Chamber spearheads pro business advocacy and political affairs on behalf of Oklahoma’s business community. Brent is a long term media personality and communications professional in the in Oklahoma. Brent currently is the Senior Vice President of Communications at the State Chamber. Previously, he worked in local news and sports, but Chad and Brent, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you both an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourselves, so we can get to know you a little bit better. Chad, would you like to take the first stab at it?

Chad Warmington 2:08
Well, I was gonna pull up, pull rank and make Brent go. So

Unknown Speaker 2:11
there you go.

Chad Warmington 2:15
So Brent, you get to go first.

Brent Skarky 2:16
Well, just happy to be here. It’s an honor to be in the running for prestigious award through a very prestigious Association, and we’ve done some great things here at the Oklahoma Chamber, and I’m very proud to be a part of it as the communications guy, and excited to keep the message going. I think we’ve got a lot of momentum here at the Oklahoma chamber, and excited to be a part of it. And something interesting about me. Played so much golf lately, I first have golf elbow for the first time. So some of the olds out there can probably relate to that

Brandon Burton 2:53
golf elbow. Alright, that is so

Chad Warmington 2:59
not interesting. I mean, okay, we’ll go with that. I wish I had something better. Yeah, no, I think, you know, I was just thinking, I mean, was always interesting for me. About Me is living in Oklahoma, and it’s a great state, right? But I’m originally from Michigan, and so I sometimes just kind of Marvel here now, coming up on year, like 27 or 28 of being here, that that Oklahoma is my home. But it’s funny how often it comes up that I’m a non native Oklahoman. And so I’d say the interesting thing is that at some point I’ll get to be, you know, get to be a certified card carrying Oklahoman. I’ve got three Oklahoma born and raised kids, but running the State Chamber of Oklahoma for a Michigan guy is a pretty cool gig, and I’m pretty excited to be here in Oklahoma, and I’m pretty excited about what we’re doing

Brandon Burton 3:48
at the chamber. Yeah, no, I can. I can resonate with that. I’m a born and raised as a California and I’m in Texas now. So took a while for Texas to accept me, but I feel like I’ve been embraced, and then I’m now a Texan, so I understand that it’ll happen. It’ll happen

Chad Warmington 4:05
one of these days. I’ll get, like, a ceremony and a certificate or something that’s right,

Brandon Burton 4:11
a belt buckle and hat has a

Chad Warmington 4:13
That’s right. That’s a great idea. Yeah, maybe we’ll start that. There’s a new chamber program for next year.

Brandon Burton 4:18
There you go. So I’d love for you guys to take a moment to tell us a little bit about the State Chamber of Oklahoma. Give us an idea. Obviously, it’s a State Chamber, so we understand, kind of the you know, the area you cover, but give us an idea of staff, size, budget, scope of work you’re involved with those sort of things to kind of set the table for our discussion today.

Chad Warmington 4:40
Yeah, I’ll jump in on that. And again, happy to be here and excited to talk to you a little bit about the State Chamber of Oklahoma. So when you know, when I’m going around the state talking to local chambers, I always try to, you know, point out kind of where our area of work is. And so for me, what I like to say is, you know, local chambers have such an important. Role in their communities, and they’re doing so many more things that we’re not doing in terms of just community development and the networking that goes on and economic development in a lot of cases. And for the State Chamber of Oklahoma, our field of work is really what we call, what I call 23rd and Lincoln, that’s the cross streets of where our state capital is. And so our focus really is on what happens in that immediate area, either under the dome at the legislature or with the executive branch, in all the executive branch and regulatory agencies. And so for us, you know that that’s kind of our everything, and that’s why it’s so great for us to be able to spend time with local chambers, hearing about those policies that we’re working on and how they’re impacting communities. So this our chamber. When I arrived here in 2020 I had about a solid three weeks before covid hit and and then the world turned upside down. So we’ve had quite a bit of change from the from that time we were a staff about 26 at the time that went down, I think our post covid Low is about 10 or 11 on staff, and now we’re back up to 20. And so you’ve had a, you know, significant turnover in our staff, which has been great. We’ve been able to bring in a lot of really good new people, and it’s been a fun team to be a part of. We’re running around about a $5 million chamber a year and and hoping to, you know, see that grow like I always tell the team, it’s, you know, more money, more mission, more revenue, more opportunity to, you know, to really impact Oklahoma and to help grow and make our mission of making Oklahoma the best place in the in the state or state, we want it to be the best place in the state, best place in the country, to grow a business and So, you know, obviously for us, you know, being a nonprofit doesn’t mean we’re not motivated by that. For us, what motivates is more revenue. We get to do more mission, and that’s what we’re excited about.

Brandon Burton 6:50
Absolutely brand anything you’d like to add to that.

Brent Skarky 6:54
Well, coming from the news background, I always knew the chamber as the voice for business in Oklahoma, and I, my mission coming on board is to make it even more so you’ve got a lot of great local chambers that do a lot of great work with the local communities and furthering business in their communities. But really it is our charge, our mission, to make sure that we are the voice for business throughout the entire state, political times, or, you know, going everywhere, as far as special interest over here and special interest over here, but it really is our goal to be that voice for business, to be some one that speaks up on behalf of the business owners and the companies of Oklahoma, and in turn, grow the Oklahoma business environment to make sure that, like Chad said, The best place in the country to grow, start and relocate a business.

Brandon Burton 7:45
Very good. Well, I know you guys are doing great work there in Oklahoma, and we’ll, we’ll dive into that, some of that work as we format these chamber the year finalist episodes. We really like to focus a majority of the conversation around the the two program synopsis that were included on the chamber year of the year application. So we will dive into that in much more detail as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, we are back from our break. How. I’ve wanted to have you guys kind of introduce what the two programs are at just a high level, and then we can dive into each one individually in more detail. So I don’t know, Brent, would you like to tell us what the what the two programs are,

Brent Skarky 10:16
sure? And I think it is pretty universal for a lot of states and chambers across the country, two big problems for the Oklahoma business community, workforce and taxes. Workforce has been a problem for our state and a lot of others, even before the pandemic, but obviously covid made it a an acute problem for a lot of different business owners and business communities throughout the state, we have done a deep dive into seeing what the real problems are with the workforce chain, and what we can do to transform the pathways, to make sure that Oklahoma has the workforce, not only to grow the state, but to really make sure that our existing companies have the workforce they needed, both the numbers and the trained employees they need to flourish and and grow their businesses, and in turn, grow the economy for the state of Oklahoma, and we’ll get into the specifics of that a little bit later. Then, on the other hand, taxes. Oklahoma has always been fairly competitive when it comes to taxes, but we had been slipping in the last couple of years. We once again did a big research dive into what where Oklahoma stands on the national level, and we found that the news just wasn’t good. So we took a look and how we can change things, and teamed up a lot of very prestigious organizations and very learned organizations when it comes to taxes to make sure that we were on the right track. And I think we’ve got a pretty good plan that we know we can’t implement immediately because change at the state level is never quick and never easy, but we’re making progress, and we continue to push forward. Because I think really when it comes to recruiting new businesses, tax code is a huge thing. Talking about that absolutely.

Brandon Burton 11:54
And Brent, I think you gave a great overview there. Chad, would you like to dive in on the workforce issues and kind of the origin and why that was such an area of importance to really tackle on the chamber level, and to to have this kind of rise to the top as a program to submit on your application. Yeah, well, so when

Chad Warmington 12:15
I got to the chamber again in 2020, for me, I wanted to really focus on being really data driven in terms of what we spent our time on. It’s easy to get, you know, kind of in the bubble of your own building and thinking about the issues that chambers always talk about. But I wanted to know from business leaders what their biggest concerns were, you know, from, not only from our members, but I also wanted to know kind of what business leaders around the state thought, you know, for me, you know, the value proposition what we do is that we’re we’re working on things that are that are headaches to businesses, or that are things that keep them up at night. But if we don’t know what those are, and we’re talking about things that we think they are, it seems like kind of a risky proposition. So for us, we really started out with research, and we went and we asked our members and business leaders around the state, you know, what were the most important things to them, what are the biggest concerns that they had? And so for us, our policy development process starts there every year, every year we do a business leader survey, and that drives our agenda. And when we got so after our first edition of that, we got the results back, and I’ll never forget, we were sitting in our conference room, and workforce was at the top of the top of the issue. It was 62% there wasn’t even a close second in terms of what business leaders were concerned about. And we’re sitting around the table and and I said to the team, well, what, what does this even mean? Like, what do we even have a workforce agenda? And the answer is, we didn’t, and we didn’t know really what it was that we were going to try to go address. And so for us, you know, building a better equipped workforce was a key, you know, issue for business leaders all across the state, because they couldn’t find quality access to the people that needed to grow their businesses, and then, therefore, Oklahoma’s economy wouldn’t grow. And so that kind of started a journey for us, which turned into partner with the governor. We got a big grant from him to go out, and we hired McKinsey, an international consulting firm, to come in and help us diagnose like, what is going on in Oklahoma’s work, workforce ecosystem that’s not working. Why are we not getting the talent that we need? And so spent about six months with them, and really came out of it with some pretty clear ideas on things that we could do to address the challenges that Oklahoma’s workforce, you know, faced. And so it’s been a really great eye opening experience for us to get to always go back to the data, right? We’re tracking our progress. We identified the issue. We’re tracking our progress on are we moving the needle on it? And I think that’s the way we’re going to continue to run as long as we’re here. I want to always make sure that we’re we’re focused on things that really matter to businesses, and that’s how we got that’s how we got started in the workforce. Space, yeah, I’d

Brandon Burton 15:01
say 62% on that feedback of the surveys that workforce really matters. And like you said, addressing workforce is going to affect the overall economy throughout the state. So I think that it becomes obvious, as you’re stating, that this is a an area of focus, that the Chamber needs to be involved with Brent, as far as the execution of this goes, what what’s been at some of the implementation tactics being used? Well, I

Brent Skarky 15:27
you take that data, data, and you look at it, and you try to figure out what was going on. And chance told this story a million times that we had a an initial plan of the workforce pipelines drawn up by some of our researchers, and they put together a chart. We call it our spaghetti chart because it looks like a plate of spaghetti. The pathway is just going all over the place. And this organization reporting to that organization, but they don’t go through this organization, and they don’t communicate with this organization. A lot of great workforce related programs going on, the state workforce related offices throughout the state that are doing great things, but they weren’t coordinated. They weren’t talking to each other. And we looked to other states to see how they did it, and we saw that there was a plan to coordinate everything going through a centralized place. We called it the Oklahoma Workforce Commission. We drew up legislation that would implement that, but we wanted a body that had autonomy to make decisions on how to best coordinate pathways for workforce to get optimum number of people trained, to get optimum number of people into the workforce, and to get those high level jobs, or those high level skills that the Oklahoma workforce needs to flourish and grow. So we worked with legislators, we work with private businesses to develop a plan that ultimately was the Oklahoma Workforce Commission, which needed legislation, but it also needed help from the governor’s office to implement as well. Because there are federal dollars that go into workforce, that that need to be funneled a certain way, and then there are state dollars that need to go into workforce, that need that the permission of the legislature to then be accessed. So it was a long process. We involved a whole lot of different offices on state level, and we were able to, last year, push through SB 621 which is the Oklahoma Workforce Commission. It is a nine person, private business person commission that will ultimately lead to better coordination in the workforce. And Chad was very skilled on some of the inner workings that it took to make this happen, and has definitely looked to other states to make sure that we’re doing this the right way, because we felt that having that private business voice was very important because the bureaucracy of the state level really hadn’t worked so far.

Brandon Burton 17:44
Yeah, so I like when a chamber can see a need, create a program or an approach and be able to spin it off so it doesn’t have to stay within the chamber forever, and it can be thriving as its own entity. What kind of connection is there with the chamber today, with the Oklahoma Workforce Commission? Is there still feedback? Do you guys sit on a board or committees, or vice versa, or have What’s that relationship look like today?

Chad Warmington 18:12
Yeah, it’s a really good question. I like to always say is, you know, it’s a crawl, walk, run, approach, on the on the Workforce Commission, right? And what I really like to say is, it’s our little baby bird, and we keep nurturing our baby bird. It isn’t quite flying yet, but it’s getting there. And so I think our relationship right now, or our connection, is one we you know, we’re pretty passionate about who got on the Workforce Commission, and so there’s three appointees each by the President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House and the governor, and we did a really good job of vetting people and then suggesting names to them, because we were really concerned about who got on it. So we still have that connection that we vetted most of the people that are on it, and then, frankly, part of the deal was we got some ARPA dollars, some American rescue plan dollars that were dedicated for the commission, but there weren’t any state dollars at first. And so once we got into that, we realized that the ARPA dollars really aren’t appropriate for administrative costs. So we’ve really kind of taken the lead on kind of shepherding it through this kind of initial six months until we just got we’re able to get some state appropriations for it, and now they’ll be able to go out and hire their executive director and get going. It’s only been up and running about six months. So we’re very connected to it. Our goal is, obviously launch it and get out of the way, but we’re also willing to do whatever it takes for it to be successful. And so we’ll continue to, you know, keep that posture that until baby bird flies and leaves the nest. We’re going to do everything we can to, you know, to keep nurturing it because we know, we think, we know it’s going to be impactful. And the folks that have been appointed to the Commission are really good, sincere, you know, private sector leaders who want to see this work. And so we’re going to do whatever it takes, frankly, to keep it going. Yeah, and. I’m

Brandon Burton 20:00
sure there’s all sorts of intricacies we can dive into, as far as the staff and how their, you know, roles are developed and and just the whole structure of the organization. And I think it was alluded to that similar things have been done in other states. So there’s models that you can look at. There’s, you know, other chambers can look to you. Other states can look to you as you kind of looked around the country as well. As we shift gears a little bit, but let’s shift a little or focus over onto the tax reform program or issue that was on the application. Chad again, if you want to give us the origins and why this was important to you. I imagine it was data driven, as your other program was, but tell us more about that.

Chad Warmington 20:50
Yeah, it really was. And again, particularly when you get into tax policy, there’s a lot of ideas and thoughts and opinions on what you know, what are the appropriate tax policies or tax reform that a state should pursue. And so again, we tried to kind of come at it from a little bit of a different view, and said, How do we make sure that Oklahoma’s tax code is competitive? And so if, at the end of the day, in terms of economic development and growth, you have to have a competitive tax code, well who’s the best to kind of measure where we where we rank on that? And again, it goes back to us, kind of in terms of the three things we do, policy, policy, policy, politics and advocacy. And we really wanted to dig into the policy on this tax reform, but we wanted to approach it from a more of an unbiased viewpoint. It’s real easy for me to think it’s, you know, gotta be, by golly, it’s gotta be the personal income tax, and we’ve gotta lower that, and that’s what’s gonna drive economic activity. But I wanted to know that for sure. I want to look at states that were doing really well, and look at our tax code as compared to the states that were so we ended up hiring the Tax Foundation based out of DC, which is a nonpartisan, really well, you know, respected organization, and said to them, Look, we want to do tax reform, but we want you to tell us what makes us the most competitive, and then we want to be able to go back and track that over time. We want to score ourselves based on if this is what competitive looks like, and we’re here. How are we going to get where we need to go? And then let’s score ourselves. And so again, it was really very data driven, and the Tax Foundation put together a fantastic kind of guideline for us to share with policymakers on what would make Oklahoma’s tax code competitive. And you know, when you’ve seen one tax code, you’ve seen one tax code, they’re all different. And so we have a really interesting mix of lower property taxes, little bit higher sales taxes and kind of a medium income tax. But where does that put us in terms of overall competitiveness? I think the Tax Foundation gave us a really good roadmap of how to make sure we balance those things in terms of what makes it competitive, but also be politically smart, like what is actually doable in the state from policy standpoint, and so it’s been a real fun journey. And the funny thing about this too, is we did this two years ago, and I tell our team, it’s our example to remember that sometimes you got to plant the seed, but it doesn’t grow right away, and it took a full year before somebody went. The chamber has a tax plan, you know? And when it did, though, it bid hard, and we were able to get real good movement on a number of portions of that tax policy. And so I think, just as a, you know, as a reminder to all the organizations that are out there listening, you always won’t see the results right away of what you do, but you got to stay the course, and if it’s good policy, eventually people are going to pay attention. It helps to have, you know, a communications team that Brent leads, that does a good job of promoting it, but good policy wins out, and stay the course when you know it’s the right policy for your community or state that you’re working in. Absolutely,

Brandon Burton 23:52
I’m glad you guys took the interest to do the research and hire the team to be able to create those KPIs and those guidelines to be able to measure your success, and what would make Oklahoma successful. And as we know, chambers don’t, you know, create tax law, right? But you can do the research. You can plant those seeds and Brent from those seeds that were planted. How have you seen it grow to where it is today? Well,

Brent Skarky 24:21
I think Chad brings up a good point, like sometimes you look at taxes and just think, cut the income tax, and that’s going to be the end all be all and everyone’s going to be happy. But we took a strong look on some of the business friendly taxes, or business not friendly taxes, that were on the Oklahoma code. And where can we make those changes, smaller tax changes to make Oklahoma more competitive. We did away with franchise tax, which was a antiquated tax that was really just a tax for doing business in Oklahoma that makes us very uncompetitive on the national scale. We also did full expensing of capital equipment that frees up businesses to grow in their own. Space, and we also push a different income tax code, but we also know that condensing tax brackets is also a way that Oklahoma can make some serious progress and be more competitive. And really it’s worked. We haven’t gotten everything through that we wanted to, because tax reform is tough, and you’re always going to get pushback from lots of different sides, but we’ve gone from 30th in the country to 19th in the country in just two years, and that has been a testament to Well, first, our staff pinpointing those tax changes that can be made, but also our government affairs staff really advocating for those smaller tax tweaks that can happen that that make a big difference, specifically when it comes to the business community, and for people looking at our tax code from the outside state. So implementing those and educating the public, we get a ton of media interest every time we talk taxes, because, let’s face it, affects everyone exactly, exactly. We just did a grocery tax that has been very popular, obviously, with the masses. But, you know, there are intricacies that we thought might be better when it comes to using that money to grow the economy. And we educated a lot of people on that, and I think that actually resounded pretty well with legislature, because it’s not always just about, you know, the bottom line, when it comes to the number, it’s about making sure the money is available within the business community to grow the existing businesses, to increase the economy.

Brandon Burton 26:31
Well, I’m impressed being ranked 30 in the nation and moving your way up to 19. I mean, you can’t get everything you want, or else you got nothing left to do right? So you got to have that job security and keep moving forward with the progress. But that is a that’s a needle being moved in a great way. So congratulations on that, and and I’m sure it’ll continue to move in the right direction as well. So great, great programs you guys have submitted, obviously making an impact in Oklahoma, and, you know, kind of leading the charge for for other Chambers as well, and being supportive there Brent, you have something to add well,

Brent Skarky 27:12
and I’ve always been a fan of Chad’s overall vision for the chamber itself is to tackle big issues. Lots of times, State Chambers will get bogged down, a little bitty tweets, little bitty nuances for specific businesses, for specific members, but we really have taken a big picture approach, doing things that will change the state to not only make it better for business, but to make it better for all Oklahomans. We passed some legislation this last spring to rework graduation requirements for Oklahoma K through 12 students that will help them have better options, ultimately leading to better jobs for them, but it helps the business community as well, because we’re going to get more trained, skilled employees and workers into the workforce, but not always. It’s not always a chamber that looks at the big picture like that, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job with that, through our workforce initiative, through our tax initiative, and some of the changes we’ve made there.

Brandon Burton 28:08
Yeah, now as a State Chamber, you guys do a lot of the heavy lifts, for sure, and I’m always amazed and appreciative of state chambers to be able to do that and provide those resources for the local chambers just take back to their communities and really amplify the advocacy that you guys are involved with and making those, those big changes. I do like to ask, as we have you guys on the podcast as a chamber the year finalist, you guys are kind of the top of your game at the moment, what kind of tip or action item might you have for listeners who are wanting to take their chamber up to the next level, but what might you suggest them to try to implement or to try to work towards that goal? Well, I

Chad Warmington 28:50
think for me, what I would say is we wouldn’t be able to do any of the stuff we’re doing if we didn’t have a team that worked really well together. And so, you know, I know that every leader has that issue of trying to get your teams to be a team and to have that collaboration. When I got here, we were very siloed off, you know, marketing and membership stayed in their lane. You know, government affairs did their thing, and there wasn’t a lot of communication back between the two. The Communications Department was kind of trying to pick up things from each of the other two departments, but there just wasn’t. There was very much siloed off. And I think the thing that for us, that made, you know, that’s really helped us turn everything kind of around and have a lot of success in the last couple years, is we knocked down all those silos, and we really are very collaborative. And frankly, we, you know, there was people that we brought in that didn’t help, and they’re no longer here. I mean, so it was a little bit of a trial and error getting the right people that could do that, and, and so my, my guess, my strong encouragement is, you know, focus on that first. Because if. You get that right once you, you know, once you kind of figure out the things you need to do for your community or your state, they become much easier when your team is a team. And then the last thing, I think is in this is, over the last year, we really implemented this is, we’re trying to build kind of, you know, excellence down throughout the organization, get people to get outside of their, you know, of their, of their, just their department. And so we’ve got cross functional teams that are working on things this year. So we as a team spent two days off site developing what our kind of four top, you know, priorities for the year are. And then we built and self selected a team within the chamber that has members from every department working on it. And so we’ll have a communications person working on a revenue issue, you know, for us, or we’ll have, you know, somebody from membership and marketing help understand, you know, what we’re going to do in terms of how the best communication strategies that we want to use are the software we use. And so we’ve got these collaborative teams that are, you know, cross pollinating each other, and I think that’s the single best thing that we’ve done in a long time. It’s been fun. We have a monthly reporting session. We have a leader of each group. And it’s been fun to get, to get and sit in those meetings and have them report back, and have our comms person leading, you know, the discussion on internal software programs that we’re going to use, you know, and so it’s an opportunity for them to grow. But what it really does is it build that sense of team. It builds the communication skills that we need internally to go get these things done. And it’s been just an eye opener for me in terms of, I’ve always, you know, known how important was to break down those silos, but to take it to the next level and force those people to work together has been a game changer for us.

Brandon Burton 31:41
Yeah, I love the idea of cross pollinating, so it does really help when you are in your, you know, maybe formally siloed area, to know what the other team members are doing, so you can work cohesively towards a common goal. So I love that idea, and that’s that’s so important to being able to elevate your organization, for sure, Brent would do you have anything that you’d like to add?

Brent Skarky 32:06
I we’ve got a great board here at the Oklahoma State Chamber with a lot of very well respected business leaders, and from a communication standpoint, I love that, because I’ve been able to use those people as our voice. Obviously, you’ve heard Chad, he’s an incredible public speaker, and we’ve gotten him out, spreading the word, I think, just the awareness of what we do. And, like I said, being that voice. But circling back to the board, using those board members as your voice as well. They are experts in their field. They’re well respected across the state, and to get those people out front, leading the charge with you as well as important. I mean, yes, do the work yourself. Speak out yourself and let people know what you’re doing. We use your board members as well as as great PR representatives, because honestly, a lot of people know them in the community, and it’s just another respected voice out there that will ultimately lead to more success for you, more buy in from the community, and just better public perception in general. And I think that it’s important to use all the tools you have at your disposal.

Brandon Burton 33:10
Absolutely. Great tip. I love it. So I like asking everyone I have on the show about how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Chad Warmington 33:22
That’s a really good question, and it’s one I think about quite a bit, you know, I think we all realize and are seeing, you know, what I like to call kind of community or civic engagement is declining. People don’t spend the time in either on chamber boards or on, you know, community organizations that they used to. So how do we one, how do we, you know, get people to spend, you know, their volunteer time on with us, on their issues. And I think it’s really pretty critically important, because if it’s not chambers leading the way on things, who’s going to, right? I mean, who’s going to step in and fill that gap and fill that void, if chambers aren’t stepping up, and community leaders aren’t stepping up, you know? So I spend a lot of time kind of, frankly, frankly worried about that. I think what we’re finding, though, is that, you know, it’s like a flywheel, right? You know, I love the good to great concept. And if, for those of you who haven’t read Good to Great, there’s a, there’s a, they call it a, there’s a version. It’s called Good to Great for the social sector, sports, it’s for people like us that are running nonprofits. And part of that flywheel is getting people involved, and the more that they feel like being involved with you serves their community. It kind of builds that flywheel effect. They want to stick around and they’re telling their friends about it. And so we’re really trying to do that. We’re really trying to recruit leaders who are going to help us recruit other leaders and keep that momentum going, because civic engagement is dropping, and if not us, who and and it’s all, you know, our success is really determined based on the quality of the volunteers that we get to come help serve, you know, on our boards and on our committees. And so we got to keep that up. And. The I think it’s something that probably all of us, you know, may lay awake at night a little bit worried about, about how to keep up civic engagement. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 35:07
and I think that needs to be preached over and over and over again. If you know who’s going to fill that void, is it echoes, you know, to chambers across the nation. So we will, we’ll keep pounding that drum for sure. Brent, how do you see the future of chambers going forward?

Brent Skarky 35:24
I think Chad, hit it right on the head. We’ve had a couple of state questions that are going to be detrimental to the business community come across the Oklahoma legislature and the Oklahoma just overall landscape in the last couple of years, and who’s going to go to bat for the business community. In that kind of situation, it’s got to be someone, and in this situation, that’s us, and that’s really what you’re supposed to do in that situation. And I think it’s important in the social media world that we all live in to not be afraid to tell people what you’re doing. Tell people that, yes, we are leading the charge on this, to make sure that people know that yes, we have your back in this situation. Because I think in years past chambers would like to maybe stay in the background a little bit, know that they’re supporting people, but not really take a out front, leading charge on some of these things. And I just don’t think that’s how the world is working anymore. People are not afraid to tooth their own horn, and we have to be okay with saying, Yes, we’re making a difference. We’re leading the charge on this, and this is why you need to be a part of it, because this is the direction the business community is leaning. It’s time to get on board and and be active and be a part of it.

Brandon Burton 36:34
I love it, but you guys are making a great impact in the state of Oklahoma, as has been expressed throughout this conversation today, I’d like to give you both an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and learn more about how you guys are doing things there at the state Oklahoma, at the State Chamber of Oklahoma, and just to reach out and connect with you. What would be the best ways to do that? Yeah. Yeah. Well, for

Chad Warmington 37:01
me, my my email desk is just pretty simple. chad@okstatechamber.com, and again, if there’s anything we’re doing that that would be helpful to another chamber, we are listen. We are not proprietary. We’re all in the all in the business of helping our community succeed. We’d be glad or happy to share anything that we’re working on with you. We’re not competitors. We’re all trying to make our communities better. And if there’s something we’re doing that would be helpful to you, please don’t hesitate to reach out and and let us know how we can be helpful.

Brent Skarky 37:34
I couldn’t agree more. I coming from TV news. You always wanted to beat the guy that worked across the street from you, and it’s been an eye opener for me to come to the chamber world and know that I can steal an idea from Kentucky or share an idea with Washington and and be collaborative and be cooperative with some of these chambers. So yeah, brent@okstatechamber.com. Would love to talk best practice on a lot of different things across the board, because I I’m an open book. I think I’ve done a couple things that might be helpful to people, but I know that there are people out there with a lot of great ideas that would help me. So would love to talk more. Absolutely.

Brandon Burton 38:07
We’ll get your your emails in our show notes for this episode. But Brent, I can see where that could be a mind shift change, you know, and that

Brent Skarky 38:18
guy, next year, no, no, you feel that idea. It’s great.

Brandon Burton 38:21
That’s right, absolutely. Well, I appreciate you guys taking the time to be with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast. I wish you the very best of luck at the chamber of the year and continue making that big impact across the state of Oklahoma.

Chad Warmington 38:35
Great. Thanks for the time. Appreciate it.

Brent Skarky 38:37
Thank you, bud.

Brandon Burton 38:38
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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2024 chamber of the year finalist series, and our guest for this episode is Heather. Kasten. Heather is the President and CEO of the Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce. Heather is from a small town just outside of St Louis, Missouri, and has been in the Sarasota region for over 14 years. She’s currently the present CEO. Prior to coming to the Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce, she was the President CEO of the Lakewood Ranch Business Alliance for five years in St Louis, she worked for Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals and Six Flags Theme parks in a variety of regional management roles. Heather’s community involvement includes membership on the board of directors for career source, Suncoast, United Way Suncoast the educational foundation of Sarasota County. And she also serves on several local advisory councils, including the USF Muma College of Business Advisory Board and the 26 West Entrepreneurship Center Advisory Board. She completed leadership Sarasota in 2014 and leadership Florida in 2023 Heather received her undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa in Business Administration, and she has an MBA from Webster University in management marketing. Heather and her husband, Clint, of 32 years and their three children enjoy calling Sarasota their home, but Heather, I am excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. And first of all, want to say a big congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a chamber of the year finalists. Very exciting, but I want to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening, and to be able to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Heather Kasten 3:00
Great. Well, thank you so much Brandon for having me today. I’m truly honored our entire team here at the Sarasota chamber. We are so thrilled and just blown away to have this recognition from ACCE. We’re really looking forward to Dallas and just so grateful for this wonderful opportunity. You know, something unique about me, I would have to say, you know, going back to my years at Six Flags Theme Parks, a lot of people, my husband, used to joke that I run the rides. And truth be told, on some of those early spring days before all the high school kids, everybody from the CEO, all levels of management. We’re working in the park for those early spring days. And so, you know, it’s just, it’s not too often you talk with somebody who actually, you know, worked on the ride. Worked on the rides. Mine was the giant Ferris wheel, so got very comfortable saying you keep your arms and legs and hands inside the ride at all times. And, you know, working for a theme park, it’s, it’s fun, as you could imagine, just a wonderful place. Did a lot of events there for a lot of companies. And just a really great time, you know, in that period of my life,

Brandon Burton 4:19
yeah, did you ever have to dress up in costume at the theme park.

Heather Kasten 4:22
We did have to, every ride had a ride costume outfit. So absolutely so you never knew, you know, if you were talking with a high schooler kid or you were talking with the CEO of, you know, the of the park, because we were all out there, all pitching in on those, you know those early spring days

Brandon Burton 4:42
still in all the secrets That’s awesome. Well, tell us about the greater Sarasota chamber. Give us an idea of the size of your chamber, staff, size, budget, scope of work, just to kind of set the stage for our discussion. Sure.

Heather Kasten 4:56
So our chamber, we have been around for 100 And four years, you know, going back to the early days, some of our things you know that we focused on, as you can imagine, Florida, going back 100 years ago, things like good roads, mosquito management, you know, competing for for tourism, you know, trying to get people from the northeast to come down and invest into the state of Florida, and obviously our scope of work have has truly evolved over the last 104 years. But we work with about 1400 local companies that employ about 60,000 employees in the region. Our team here, I always say we’re small but mighty. We have 12 full time and three part time team members. And, you know, I know we’ll get into the discussion about some of the program, programmatic work that we do here. It’s truly incredible what this small body of people, what we’re able to accomplish with with that, you know, tide of a ship we have. You know, we’re always looking to diversify our economy. Sarasota, as you can imagine, very big in tourism and real estate. And a lot of the work that we do, you know, is in that economic development space of trying to support other industries that make our community a little bit more resilient during, you know, economic downturns. So I know we’re going to talk about some of our programs later. We’ll, we’ll get into that, but we do a good portion of, you know, probably close to over, well over 100 events per year, ranging in size and scope, something you know, small and and more, you know, intimate type of events for 20 to 25 people, all the way up to last Friday, we hosted our Small Business Awards with over 600 people in a significant wait list on that event. Our but annual budget is about $1.8 million in annual revenue. And out, we’ll get into it a little bit. But just, you know, we’re finding that, you know, getting away from solely relying on membership dollars and some of these programs that we’ve kind of brought under the umbrella, you know, have really helped to, you know, fund the mission and the work that we’re doing here at the Sarasota chamber. That’s

Brandon Burton 7:20
great. Yeah, anytime you can talk about non dues revenue, ways to bring in the dollars, please feel free to interject that into our conversation. Today, I find it interesting where a community where tourism could be viewed as kind of the bread and butter of the community, to be able to have your mindset on economic development, what do we do as you know, to keep the community thriving economically, even if there’s a downturn or in different times of the year, where maybe tourism is not as popular, although in Florida, the weather’s always beautiful, right? Yeah, so for the majority of our conversation today, we’ll focus on the two programs or submitted on your chamber the year application, and we’ll dive into the details and what those programs are all about. As soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Heather, we. Are back, if you would please introduce to us what the first program is you’d like to address. It was on your chamber of the year application, and kind of what the origins of it were, and why that became an area of interest for your chamber to address.

Heather Kasten 10:17
Sure, the first program is called Career Edge, and we have a very, very strong workforce arm here called Career source Suncoast, which works very closely in that workforce space. They deal with a lot of federal dollars. About 14 years ago, a program was created called Career Edge, which was funded by private funders, so foundations, locally and really at a national level, funded put money into this fund, the Career Edge fund. And what we do with that money is we look at what are the top industries, we look at the employers in our region, what are their needs? And then, what are some career pathways where someone can get kind of that first level certification and really be put on a path, on a career ladder, or journey, you know, to be able to make more money over the course of their lifetime. And so for us in our region, the five industries that we really honed in on were insurance, automotive, healthcare is huge, and that’s what we started with 14 years ago, manufacturing and then the trade. So think about HVAC, plumbing, electrical. We’ve we’ve moved a little bit into some logistics and transportation as well as some technology and as well as, you know, being on the coast of Florida marine technology, so you know, the ability to work on on boats and and marine products. But what we do is we partner with a training provider. So it could be a locals. Could be our local state college of Florida. It could be an independent private training provider. We talk with our employers. First, we find out what their needs are, we find a training partner, and then we market the program. We market it through here in Sarasota, and even within our chamber, we have over 200 nonprofits who are connected with a lot of these folks who are, you know, they’re, you know, in a minimum wage job, it could be fast food, it could be, you know, it could even be someone within a current company, someone working the linen room at the hospital, that someone sees some potential impossibility. And then we put these folks through the training in one of these industry segments. We fully fund that training. If it involves buying tools. We purchase the tools if it involves, if it’s healthcare and they need certain, you know, vaccinations, or, you know, all of those things are funded. We put them through the training, and then we place them in chamber member companies. So it’s a win for the individual. It’s a win for these companies. And when you look at the opportunities that are put before these people who participate in the training, it really does, you know, change the trajectory of their lifetime, incoming, you know, income potential. It’s such a phenomenal program over the course of the 14 years. I mean, we literally have trained 1000s of individuals and placed them with local companies.

Brandon Burton 13:28
That’s awesome. So you shared a few examples of how you find these, these young people, to get into the program. But are there other examples of how you find them to kind of fill that pipeline and pull the intro. I love that example, somebody working in the linen department in the hospital or something. But what are some of those resourceful ways of finding these people to join the program?

Heather Kasten 13:50
Yeah, well, the cohorts, you know, we put them through because we do a lot of hand holding and shepherding these cohorts. We do them in groups of 15, usually is kind of the magic number, and it can be, like I said, our community partners, our nonprofits, be surprised. You know, even the churches, you know, somebody’s grandson is, you know, not on the right path, and grandma refers them to us. It they come all different ways. You know, of course, we do the traditional ways of, you know, we do a press release. But really, it’s so much more organic than that. It really comes from these partners, or even the Salvation Army, or, you know, could be any of our any of the nonprofits that we work with that refer them. And then, you know, these people, you know they’re where they are for a reason. You know, they’ve had some life circumstances that have happened to them, and so we have a dedicated person, our Career Edge manager, who really comes alongside of these folks and helps them. If they miss a class, he’s calling them, Hey, why’d you miss class last night? Oh, your car broke down. Guess what? I’m going to send over a couple of Uber gift cards. Cards. Don’t miss class tonight. Here’s your ride to class. It’s that level of intention and detail that help get these folks across the finish line.

Brandon Burton 15:09
Yeah. And so are you able to put any kind of tracker on these? These people who go through the cohorts to see their their career development, and kind of get some check ins with them along the way.

Heather Kasten 15:21
We they are checked in with through the entire program. Now, once they come out of the program and they’re placed, it’s a little bit hard to, you know, keep tabs on that, but we have some incredible success stories. I mean, there’s, you know, there’s some folks that you know constantly reach back to us and say, you know, if it weren’t for you, I, you know, I’d still be flipping burgers, or I’d still be, you know, whatever the you know, the minimum wage job is. But we do have, every year that program, we hire an independent third party evaluator. So it’s not just, you know, the chamber and career beating our chest of like, Oh, look at the great work we did. We fund an independent evaluator to come in and really evaluate the work. Look at the wage increases like we track, okay, what wage, when they started this program, they were at this wage, and when they completed the program, they were at this wage. And we can track those, you know, you know, those differentials between, you know, when they started and when they completed the program. And that’s how every year, we’re able to go out and get this private funding. And that is really what differentiates us from career source, Suncoast, which we refer people to them all the time because our money is private. There is no red tape. We make it as easy as possible to get these people into the program and then shepherd them through. That’s

Brandon Burton 16:42
wonderful. So I know for a lot of people, their experiences as they go into a career option or enter the workforce, they’re based upon their their experience, what they’ve seen from their parents or mentors that are in their life. And if they don’t have that example to look to or to be able to see what options are available a program like this is so crucial being able to just open their mind to what the options are and see, you know, just how big the world is and what they can do. Is there an application process to get into a cohort, and what kind of things are you looking for on an application to justify somebody joining the cohort? Yeah,

Heather Kasten 17:21
it really depends on which industry segment, you know, the insurance segment has different qualifications than the nursing than the electrical cohort. So it really does depend. There is an application process and we do do some personality testing. You know this we this funding is so crucial, and we want to have the absolute best return on investor investment for our funders. And so we do do some testing to see, you know, is this person you know are the odds that they are going to complete the program? And again, you have to keep in mind the population you know that you are dealing with. They, you know, they do come with some struggles and some, you know, some things from their past. We don’t just put them through the training. We also really incorporate some life skills training and some kind of emotional intelligence training, you know, interviewing skills. So they’re not going to their first interviewing and the first question they’re asking is, how much vacation time do I get? Really setting them up for success, helping them with their resume. So it’s, it’s much more than just a job training program.

Brandon Burton 18:25
Yeah, I love that. I love seeing the opportunities for people to develop their careers and see their horizons be widened. So I can just imagine that the sense of pride that you see as these people go through the program,

Heather Kasten 18:38
it really is. Brandon, yeah.

Brandon Burton 18:42
So as we change gears to the other program on your application, tell us what that’s about.

Heather Kasten 18:49
So our another program that we have, we have gotten private funding for through one of our local foundations, is called our opportunities for all program, and it has kind of two prongs. The first prong focuses on interns. So placing minority interns, uncovering what their interests are, and then placing them with companies that they can learn and grow through an eight week internship process. And we fully fund that so the employers, you know, hold those pay stubs. And at the end of the eight week internship, they submit us, you know, the pay stubs to us, and then we reimburse that company fully up to $3,000 for that eight week internship. We also, this year, something new. We added, we added an intern half day conference called spark, and that was actually just held this past week. We had about 70 local interns, 30 of which were our opportunities for all interns, but did a half day workshop on again, resume, building, networking, mentoring, how to, you know, connect with others, how to build their personal brand and and now. Work. So that’s really exciting. These are interns who really would not have had any opportunity like this to actually work within a company and get paid in their field of interest. The other prong for the opportunities for all program is minority business grant funding. So this program has been around for about four years. And last year, for example, we had, we had probably close to 100 minority businesses apply. We funded 20 of that the 100 that had applied, and we deployed about $100,000 so each minority business, you know, had different asks. For some, it was, I need, you know, some support to market my company. So we’ve, you know, funded, you know, six months of some social media advertising. For some it was capital things like a laptop, so that they could get their finances out of, maybe their personal checking and into QuickBooks and onto a laptop computer. Every ask was was different. The grants were anywhere from 1000 to $10,000 in nature. And then we really support these. These 20 companies, all were granted chamber memberships. We have programming throughout the year to support them, entrepreneurial classes that we partner with 26 West, which is our business incubator here in Sarasota, to again come alongside of them and give them resources, solutions, and also funding to really help build their businesses. And that has been so rewarding as well. We’ve got some incredible success stories of companies that, you know, have gone from, you know, someone kind of doing it as a side hustle, to, you know, being able to, you know, quit their corporate job and, you know, really come over into that entrepreneurial space.

Brandon Burton 21:54
Yeah, those $1,000 grant applications, when you said that that really pulls at my heart strings. Somebody’s needing to ask for for that amount to be able to make their business work. And I almost just on the amount, want to make sure that those ones are awarded. But it’s got to be tough to go through that many applications and and find where the money goes. Yeah. So with both of these programs, you’ve you’ve mentioned the chamber is kind of foot in the bill for a lot of these things, whether it’s helping get supplies for someone entering a workforce, or the vaccinations or reimbursing their their pay for the eight weeks in the internship. Do you mind speaking a little bit to how these are funded? You mentioned they’re both privately funded. So how do you go about funding these programs? So we

Heather Kasten 22:45
have started again. We we really track our funders. So Career Edge being that it’s been around for 14 years, we probably have eight to 10 funders, and we have two very large foundations here within Sarasota who really believe in that mission of workforce and upskilling workers. So they are great funders. The best thing you know when you’re out looking at grants is the flexibility of grants. You know, there’s some grants that are so limiting and narrowing that it’s just impossible to fulfill. You know, the request of the grants. And what’s nice about the foundations that we work with, they, you know, they support the funding of staff to run these programs. Because, as we all know, these programs do not run themselves. So without the funding for actual staff, these programs, they couldn’t occur. They couldn’t couldn’t happen. And so, you know, we, every year, are looking at, you know, private foundations, whether it be the Walmart Foundation, whether it’s Boeing foundation, you know, there are foundations who, you know, you really have to invest the time to find out, you know, what their missions are and what they invest in. And we’ve spent a lot of time doing that. And that’s really how we’ve, you know, come to have funders for both Career Edge and then, you know, funders for the opportunities for all program. These are foundations that, again, believe in this work. We’re doing the work, and they, you know, they fund it every year.

Brandon Burton 24:17
That’s awesome. Yeah, you guys have put in the work, for sure, that’s That’s great. So I like asking, especially as you guys are a chamber, that you’re a finalist. Chambers across the country are looking to you guys in your example, so no pressure. But for what kind of tips or action item might you share for a listener who is looking to take their chamber up to the next level.

Heather Kasten 24:44
You know, I’ve thought a lot about that question, and one of the things I think, well, I’ll share two things. First is process in the chamber world. It does, you know, we don’t stop, right? It is, you finish one event and you’re on to the next. Next 10. So I’m a big believer in, you know, setting up processes for everything that occurs under the roof of a chamber. And that way, you know, when you do have turnover, which we all do, you know, you’ve got a trail of breadcrumbs for that next person to come in and follow. So, big believer in process. And then, you know, I would say secondly, as chamber leaders, the importance of really taking care of your staff. I want to be able to look myself in the mirror and say, I’ve done everything in my power to keep the staff intact, to keep them encouraged and motivated and challenged, not overwhelmed. I don’t want anyone showing up to work feeling, you know, worn down, ragged out, exhausted, overwhelmed, that’s I don’t want to show up at a place and work like that. And so I would say, the last two to three years, we’ve just been really hyper intentional of the things that we’re doing with our staff making sure that, you know, we’re having early outs in the summer. We’re planning fun activities. We we’ve got a beautiful new aquarium coming up in our town, and just last week, took the team to do a behind the scenes tour. You know, nobody else got this opportunity but the chamber team. So I’m always looking for unique and special things to really bless them with. And, you know, just make sure that they are feeling good about the work and energized about the work. And you know, that’s something that you have to do with intention. It doesn’t just happen. And the timing is never good. You can say, Oh, well, we’ve got this big thing next week. Well, guess what? After next week, there’s going to be the next big thing. So making sure that you’re taking time to, you know, really engage your staff and build a culture that is one where people want to come and show up and work, and then for the chamber leaders and the CEOs, make sure, you know, in the the airline world, make sure you’re putting your oxygen mask on as well, because you cannot pour into members, pour into your board, pour into your staff if you aren’t refreshed and and, you know, refueled yourself. And so making sure that you’re taking that time and listen. I need, I need this advice as much as anybody I’m giving it as if I’m, you know, you know, I buy into it. And we really do have to plan those intentional days, you know, a half day, even if it’s once a quarter, where you get out of the office and you clear your head and you give some thought to working on the business instead of working in the business. Those would be my couple of tips. Brandon,

Brandon Burton 27:43
yeah. Fact, when you said process at the beginning, my mind went to where you just ended with to be able to take that pause and to be able to to process what you went through. So if there’s a big event that you you’ve put on, to take time afterwards to process the how things went and evaluate and take a breather, put on that oxygen mask, and be able to kind of re energize for the next thing. But to your point about taking care of your staff, I’d love that example, yeah, taking them out to that aquarium that see the behind the scenes, something special just for your team. And of course, we want to be able to take care of them monetarily whenever you can. But we all know chambers don’t always have the funding to take care, to pay what they’re deserved, right? But to be able to have those opportunities really adds to that experience. And

Heather Kasten 28:34
you know, that’s something that you do have to be intentional about, too. You know, we I do want, I want our team to be paid as well as any, you know, regular corporate jobs. So I feel that’s my responsibility, is to, you know, find that money to bring in the resources so that anybody working here at the Sarasota chamber, you know, has a, has a really good, you know, way of life.

Brandon Burton 29:00
Yeah, you’re gonna be flooded with applications. Now, I’m just kidding. No. Seriously, though, Heather, this has been great. I’d like to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who’d like to reach out and learn more about how you guys are doing things there at the Greater Sarasota chamber.

Heather Kasten 29:19
Absolutely. Again, it’s Heather Kasten. My email is hkasten@sarasotachamber.com. I’d love to connect with with anyone. I love bouncing ideas off each other. The great thing about the chamber world is I feel like there’s so many opportunities to share best practices. You know, as long as it’s not you know, the Chamber up the street. You know, aside from that, I mean, the world is your oyster, right? For new ideas and fresh ideas. My office line here, 941-556-4050, and really, just excited, you know, love to to talk chamber stuff. So anyone who’d like to reach out and. Be happy to connect with you and learn you know, really enjoy learning more about you as well.

Brandon Burton 30:05
That’s awesome. I appreciate that, and that’s the whole point of the show, right? Share those best practices and be able to help people connect. So we’ll, we’ll post your contact information in our show notes for this episode so people can find it there. But Heather, this has been great. I’ve enjoyed having you on the show and have I wish you and your team best of luck. It’s chamber of the year in Dallas.

Heather Kasten 30:26
We’re so excited we can’t wait. Thanks so much bringing in for your you know the opportunity today. Really enjoyed our conversations.

Brandon Burton 30:35
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Bend Chamber-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Katy Brooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brandon Burton 31:52
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Vail Valley Partnership-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Chris Romer

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

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You’re joining us for a special episode and our 2024 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series and our guests for this episode is Chris Romer. Chris serves as the President and CEO of Vail Valley Partnership or the VVP. Vail Valley Partnership is a Regional Chamber of Commerce, destination sales organization and economic development organization representing Eagle County, Colorado and was named Chamber the Year by ACCE in 2016 and 2020. As CEO of the Vail Valley Partnership, he brings a wealth of experience in strategic planning, business development and partnership building to the organization. With a deep understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities facing Colorado’s mountain region. Chris is dedicated to driving innovation and collaboration to ensure the continued success and sustainability of local businesses and communities. Chris is a macroscopic thinker who believes in tackling big issues through localized solutions. He is a graduate of the US Chamber Foundation’s IOM program and is CCE certified chamber executive. He’s also been named a top 25 Mind in hospitality sales, marketing and revenue management by hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International Chamber Executive of the Year by the Colorado Association Chamber of Commerce and Industry Colorado chamber executives, and was named a PEDDIT award winner by the Western Association of Chamber Executives. Chris is a respected voice in the chamber and economic development fields and is known for his ability to bring stakeholders together to achieve common goals. Chris has a is committed to making positive impact within the Vail Valley and on a broader scale, serving on advisory boards and participating in initiatives aimed at advancing community prosperity and enhancing quality of life. Chris, first of all, congratulations to you and your team on this great accomplishment of being named a ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist again, that’s a huge feat, but uh, welcome to the show, I’ll give you a chance to say hello to all the listeners out there and and I love to have you share something interesting about yourself as well as we kick this off.

Chris Romer 3:32
Yeah, Brandon, thank you so much. And you know, it is such a such an honor to be recognized by ACCE as a finalist for chamber of the year. It’s such a testament to the people and the board and the community that we represent. And it’s something that we never, ever take for for granted. You know, we really try to keep our foot on the proverbial gas pedal, to move things forward and to represent the interests of our business community. So, such a great opportunity to share a little bit of our story with you and to be recognized by ACCE for those community programs and community impact that we that we strive to make so thank you so much. I also certainly realized that an interesting thing about me is probably the fact that I can’t write a short bio, that bio was awfully long and awkward. So I would I would love to have a second crack at that and just keep it a whole lot shorter. So we could talk about the fun stuff because talking about me not so much fun talking about our chamber and our community and our programs. A whole lot more interesting to people.

Brandon Burton 4:49
I could agree with that it talking about the the great work you guys are doing is much more impactful and meaningful anyway but it is fun to get to know the background on yet and you I’ll share a fun fact I think you are the first three Pete chamber chat podcast so there should be I feel like there should be a trophy or something for you for being I’ll take a trophy

Chris Romer 5:14
I would love to take a trophy for being the first three time visitor or three time guests on the on the chamber chat podcast.

Brandon Burton 5:22
Yes, yes, you You deserve it. So well tell us about your great team, their the Vail Valley Partnership, the the work you guys are involved with the size of your staff budget, scope of work all that as we get into our discussion today.

Chris Romer 5:37
Yeah, we have. We’re really fortunate I have a great team. We have a team of eight full time and two part time. Employees We are located in Edwards, Colorado. That’s Eagle County, Vail and Beaver Creek ski resorts, home to Vail, Beaver Creek ski resorts for those who might not know what Edward’s are or know where Eagle county might be. But we’re right in the heart of, of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. We have you had asked about our budget and membership size, we have just under 800 members. And our community is about 55,000 people. And that represents nine nine towns and we’re a countywide regional organization, our annual budget is about $1.3 million per year. You know, and I think the last part of what you had asked for in regards to giving people a perspective, we are a we’re a program driven chamber. We are a program driven chamber we have we have multiple 501 C sixes, we have c threes. And we have these different initiatives and we branch them off. And we’ll talk a little bit about more more about this, I think as we go through the podcast, but very program driven. And it reflects in in how we approach problems. And if that leads to some of our retention and other components that we may or may not touch on but we are we are very program driven group and you know, we’re not afraid to take big swings we take we take some really big swings within our community and in sometimes we strike out and sometimes we hit a double and occasionally we hit a homerun Yeah,

Brandon Burton 7:29
I think chamber works should be about those big swings make an impact. If you’re not if you’re not swinging big, what kind of impact are you making right? So I am excited to dive into this. So on these chamber the are finalists series for those who may not be familiar with the format, I’d like to really focus on the two programs and being program driven will focus on the two programs that were submitted on your chamber the your application and dive into some detail around those and why they worked for Vail Valley and we’ll dive into this as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Alright Chris, we’re back. So let’s let’s dive into these programs you submitted on the chamber the your application, I know. It can be tough sometimes to kind of narrow down the focus and what you want to put on the application and really highlight the work that you guys are doing. But how did you land on these on these two programs? And what are they?

Chris Romer 10:08
Yeah, it’s, you know, how we landed on them is a little bit what I talked about earlier in the podcast, around taking big swings. And recognizing that big ideas require big solutions. Both of our both of our Synopsys, both of our case studies are around that idea that big ideas require big solutions. So our first Synopsys is the Eagle Valley Transportation Authority, where we lead the yes for transit ballot campaign to create a transportation authority, which is something that had been lacking in our community. Our second synopsis is the eagle county Collaborative for career pathways. That is a talent pipeline, Workforce Initiative, in partnership with our K to 12 school system to identify and train young people into the jobs that our community needs. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 11:12
So just from our background, and having on the show a couple times before, I guess I have a little bit of maybe added perspective, I think about your community and and why these, these two programs specifically would be of importance. But let’s dive in a little bit more on the Regional Transit Authority. Why? Why was that a hot topic? Why Why was that a big swing in your community? What was the need? And and how did you guys go about addressing that?

Chris Romer 11:41
Yeah, it’s so it’s so important for us. So we started this process. Actually, before the before the pandemic we had brought together, we recognized our population is growing, our ski resorts need to be world class destinations, our visitors are continuing to come. And yet our community growth, strained our housing and transportation systems, and our ability to move our workforce from one side of our valley to the other. We’re about a 40 mile wide, 40 mile long valley, and about a mile and a half wide, right, you’re surrounded by mountains and national forest on two sides. So we’re along linear Valley, and our housing prices, our median housing price is $1.3 million. So we really needed a transportation system that could effectively and efficiently move our workforce, up and down our valley or housing is a little bit less expensive, on the western end. So our basic premise is that improved transit supports workforce that helps our residents get to work home and school, it allows our visitors to better enjoy their experience. And this is a regional issue that required a regional solution. So we initiated the business community, we brought together our local municipalities and county, some of them run their own transit authorities. But there was nothing collaborative and nothing that was truly Valley wide. So we did focus groups, we did phone surveys of voters, we looked at what different models exist for funding transportation. We looked at 18 different models and governance structures, and landed on the Regional Transportation Authority as our best bet forward. Then we looked at how do you fund this thing. And we could have done property tax or a sales tax. And we made the decision. To move forward, we made the call in June of 2022, to go to the ballot in November. At the time for it’s hard to think about now. At the time, inflation was at 9.2%. So when we talk about having having courage and taking big swings, we said we’re gonna go to the ballot, and we’re going to ask people for a sales tax to fund this. And by the way, knowing inflation was over 9%. And we made that call, unfortunately, inflation dropped a little bit by the time we had the election. But we passed. We passed in November of 2022. Pretty overwhelmingly, I think, because we really helped to tell the story and identify the need and what this would create. As we sit here today. We have a complimentary free bus system that runs the length of our valley. Ridership for this past winter season was up 164% over the previous model, and it’s saving people time and money.

Brandon Burton 14:58
That’s amazing. It just it to be able to see it through to. So a lot of times when we’re talking about these programs and maybe leading a ballot initiative, you haven’t seen it all the way through to this point, but being that you’ve been able to lead that been able to collect the data, you know, have a successful ballot measure, and then to be able to see the results, the fruit of it right now happening throughout your Valley. That’s, that’s amazing. And I’m sure you’re seeing economic tickers, you know, the different indicators that you can measure to see the impact throughout the community as well. We are

Chris Romer 15:36
we’re able to see the increase in ridership, we’re able to see how many routes are are scheduled, how they’re completed. We did include funding for air service development in our ballot initiative. That’s a program that we’ve run for years at the chamber. And we always fundraised for. So we actually baked that into the ballot question to fund that. And we have two new flights this summer that we’re able to use that that funding to support two new Air Service flights. So we’re seeing the benefits on a local level, from a workforce standpoint, from a visitor standpoint. And we have long term enhancements that are baked into this as well, which included affordable workforce housing for transit employees, and included zero admissions, conversion, to help meet our climate goals for our region. So we’re really we’re really excited about not just the bus transportation, which is a big part of it. But the secondary components that were able to be part of that ballot initiative and more part of our storytelling around air service development and increasing opportunities for visitors to get here and locals to go on vacation. And to help achieve our climate goals. So we’re really, this one’s a was a big swing. For all the reasons we talked about, and a really nice success story that is helping make people’s lives easier. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 17:07
So with the bus system, it’s a it’s a free transit, right? So is there a way to track when people get on how long they’re on? Or is it just kind of hop on hop off as you go. And now there’s

Chris Romer 17:20
bus counters, there’s counters to know what the ridership is and how it increased. You know, in January, for example, of 2024, we had over 218,000 unique riders on the bus. And that’s an increase from 167,000, the year before, in the same timeframe in January. So we’re huge ridership increases. And we’re, we’re paying for it through the sales tax instead of having people pay a fare. And we have new routes because of the new authority and able to bridge a lot of what the individual communities were already doing to provide that connectivity.

Brandon Burton 18:01
Yeah. So as far as bringing workforce into the valley, is that are you able to see that direct tie in where they’re coming from the west side of the valley? Like you’d mentioned?

Chris Romer 18:10
Yeah, we are a route. Again, we saw a 64% increase in in transit ridership from the lower part of our Valley. So we can track that. The new authority tracks it, they share it with us, our work is kind of done on this one. But yes, it’s a it’s a huge success. And the community recognizes the role that the Chamber played in initiating leading and passing this ballot initiative to create the new authority.

Brandon Burton 18:42
That’s great. And it’s always nice when you can hand it off when it’s done. And you don’t have to keep ownership of it ongoing. Right.

Chris Romer 18:47
You know, we we at the chamber at the partnership, we might be experts on our community. And we’re certainly experts on on convening leaders in order to get things done. We’re certainly an expert on being a catalyst for for business growth. We are not an expert on how to run a transportation authority. Right. So we’re happy to have this one off.

Brandon Burton 19:11
Absolutely. Well, let’s switch gears to the second program that was submitted on the application around that building that talent pipeline and kind of again, the the origins of it and how it developed and in the impact that it’s making in the community. Yeah,

Chris Romer 19:27
so the second is synopsis was the eagle county Collaborative for career pathways. And that was a program that had had grown and morphed. We’ve been running a youth apprenticeship programs for a number of years. We have a very successful youth apprenticeship model. We’re involved with career exploration, in partnership with another local nonprofit in our school system. And this we really recognize that There are a handful of us doing great work. And there is still an opportunity gap at the end. So we work in sync to create viable, affordable alternative pathways to get people into high quality careers, with the idea that those need to be transparent about the outcomes and the cost, help young people obtain their relevant job skills, and ensure that employers value recognize and hire from the kids that we put through this pathway. So in Eagle County, specifically, Brandon, our businesses show an average 10% gap in securing and retaining young professionals across industry sector, with health care and education, are rising to near 30% levels of that gap. So working with our business community, our school district, youth serving nonprofit agencies, were able to target those key sectors and build the collaborative, we’re very fortunate to receive a million dollar grant by which to do this work with the idea to strengthen the systems that already support the career pathways, increase student readiness to pursue pathways and increase students exploration and experience in career exploration, and exploring those career opportunities. So it’s a really nice partnership. It’s a really meaningful program with very tangible results. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 21:43
I think that’s a struggle that a lot of chambers have is trying to retain the workforce that you put them through K through 12. And, and for whatever reason, it’s like these students graduate high school, and they want to move on to the bigger and brighter things outside of the community they grew up in, right? And, you know, what can we do to try to keep them local, show them how great this community is, and, and maybe they go away to school somewhere and you’re, you know, get some kind of education, but bring them back is such a key to be able to entice them, show them what there is in the community to bring them back why it’s a place for them. So having a program like this, I think really hits on those points of need. And I could see being something that and I know a lot of chambers have some sort of a workforce development, you know, pipeline or program with the school districts and whatnot. But to be able to draw that attention and keep them, keep them in the community is so key. So I think this is great work that you guys are involved with this program specifically. There’s anything else stand out to you with this program? As far as trying to retain this workforce here? Is there any any kind of secret sauce that you’re seeing that’s really been the AHA kind of moment, or they just with how the partnership has developed that is really made a big, big impact? I

Chris Romer 23:13
think so I think the secret sauce or the the aha moment is that this needs to be a program that is business centric, right? It can’t be a program that is just a feel good or a do good for the kids. It has to benefit the business. And it has to strengthen the systems that support not only the career pathways for students, but solves problems for the businesses. And I think that’s a that’s a big component that sometimes when we think about workforce, even in the chamber business, inherently, to serve the needs of our businesses. When we ask businesses to donate their time, we ask businesses to donate their expertise, instead of flipping that equation and saying, we’re going to do this for the business. And it happens to help the kids. We do it for the business. We do everything we do to build a stronger community and stronger businesses, the kids and the career pathway is a way to build stronger businesses. It’s not asking the businesses to help kids.

Brandon Burton 24:23
Yeah, I think that is that is a key. I’m glad you made that point, that distinction, because I think it’s easy to look at the kids and they Oh, we want to help give them a good career. And that’s noble. That’s

Chris Romer 24:35
Yes. But but that’s a that’s a that’s a secondary outcome. That’s not the primary purpose. Exactly.

Brandon Burton 24:40
Yeah. So you get the businesses on board by letting them know this is about you. This is about strengthening your business and providing good talent, you know, to keep the strong. I’m glad you made that distinction. That’s great. So I like it, especially as a as a chamber the year finalists? I think chambers can can look at you as kind of the top of the game right now, you know, as a chamber, they are finalists, and for a chamber listening who’s trying to elevate their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tips or strategies might you offer for listeners to try to accomplish that goal and to try to give that their organization that boost they’re looking for?

Chris Romer 25:24
Yeah, it’s it’s such a great if thought challenge for for chambers of commerce, to think, how do we what is that? What is that one tip? What’s the one thing you would share? And I’m going to answer that by suggesting and challenging chambers, to move away from thinking that what we do have it fixes technical challenges in our community. We don’t have technical challenges. Technical challenges are things that can be fixed by engineers, they can be fixed by surgeons and people with specific training. There’s not too many of us that came into this business, trained to run a chamber of commerce, right, we’re trained in a more of an adaptive way. So that’s my takeaway. Recognize that you have adaptive challenges, not technical challenges. And let me expand on that a little bit. Because I expect that doesn’t make much sense. Without context. When we think of adaptive challenges, the things that we face in our community, maybe it’s early childhood, transportation or workforce, maybe it’s homelessness, it could be any number of different things. We have the white. So then the question is, so what? Right, so what right that that’s a problem. And then it’s now what? How are we going to do that? So the framework, and the challenge to listeners thinking about adaptive challenges? is learning learning the what? Listening, taking action, I think we collectively do a great job of listening. Every chamber listening to this listens to their businesses listens to their community does surveys, they listen. It’s the question of taking action, how do we take action? How do I identify the steps to take action. The two last parts I’ll add on this is adaptive challenges have long term implications. They’re not transactional, they’re not, we’re going to do this, they have long term, community benefit, long term benefit to the chamber to the, to the community, to the businesses. And we’re really never ever going to fix quote, unquote, fix, and adaptive challenge. All the things I listed early childhood, workforce, housing, workforce development, talent pipeline. It’s homelessness, when we say fix what we mean is make better chambers have a very unique positioning and a position of trust within their communities, to tackle these adaptive challenges that are hard, they’re long term, and fixing the endzone always moves. So fixing these challenges really means making it better. And that that changes year after year, initiative after initiative, it never really goes away. And that creates stability. And that should hopefully create fundraising opportunities and grant funding and membership retention, and all the things. So that’s my one takeaway, and it was a really long answer. But I really want to share that if we can do that. And we can shift our thinking away from technical into adaptive, that chambers are going to fly, we’re going to thrive, because we’re going to be so uniquely positioned that no one can do what we do.

Brandon Burton 29:01
Yeah. So I like the idea that that adaptive challenges have long term implications. And I know you mentioned at the beginning of the episode about retention, and that kind of plays into here. Is there. Is there more you wanted to touch on with the aspect of retention before we wrap things up? Um,

Chris Romer 29:22
no, I don’t think so. I mean, I think that if anything, it’s really just when we talk about retention, there’s so many ways to spin that as retention of employees retention of people in our communities retention of business, retention of membership. I think if we as chambers, have had this mind frame of tackling big problems in our community and approaching it in an adaptive relationship driven manner. Then our work becomes central to the success of the community. And if we become central to the success of the community, we have solved retention at each of those levels that I talked about.

Brandon Burton 30:06
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. So the question I asked everyone as they haven’t on the show is about the future of chambers, which I think you kind of touched on with your your tip there. But how do you see the future of chambers in their purpose going forward?

Chris Romer 30:21
Yeah, I did lead into this a little bit or leak into this, if you will. But the I think the future of chambers is really, really bright, with a caveat. And that caveat is if we roll up our sleeves and tackle the big problems, our purpose, our purpose needs to be around that, that problem solving. And again, when I say problem solving, I mean, making things better versus versus traditionally fixing things. But we can make things better. I think all the finalists that you’re going to be talking to throughout this series, probably have one, if not both of their synopsis, focusing on how they made their community better. And I think that’s a lesson for everybody within the chamber of business. And if we can focus on our purpose being problem solving, and how we do that, knowing that it’s really hard, knowing that it’s long term, knowing that it causes some sleepless nights, knowing that it’s probably not going to go over well with everybody in our community. And we’re going to have the courage to do those things. Boy, the future of chambers is so bright.

Brandon Burton 31:31
Yeah. encouraged as important in that, as you mentioned, so absolutely. Swing big and have courage. Chris, this has been fun to have you back on chamber chat podcast. I love the pieces of advice you share the experiences you have, and especially the impact you guys are making. They’re there in the Vail Valley. I’d like to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who’d like to reach out and connect with you and learn more about what you guys are doing there at the VVP we’re what would be the best way to connect with you. Yeah,

Chris Romer 32:06
you can find all of my contact information on our website at VailValleyPartnership.com. That’s VailValleyPartnership.com. I can be reached at cromer@VailValleyPartnership.com. And you can find me on most of the social channels and my phone numbers on the website as well and all of that, but VailValleyPartnership.com is your best place to go.

Brandon Burton 32:31
Very good. So back from Episode 21, I think was your first appearance and we’re at episode 285 Now, but this has been a blast, Chris. Thanks for being with us. Again. Here. You’re on chamber chat podcast today and wish you and your team the best of luck.

Chris Romer 32:48
Thanks so much, Brandon.

Brandon Burton 32:51
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Chino Valley Chamber-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Zeb Welborn

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

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

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You’re joining us for a special episode and our 2024 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series and our guests for this episode is Zeb Welborn. Zeb is the President of the Chino Valley Chamber of Commerce and Wellborn Social Media dedicated to promoting local businesses through growth and digital marketing. And award winning executives Zeb is passionate about connecting with driven individuals and fostering community development through initiatives like Upskill Chino Valley, recognized as the 2023, Executive of the Year by WACE, he continues to excel in leadership and service. Zeb, I want to welcome you to Chamber Chat Podcast are excited to have you with us today and say big congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a chamber the year finalists this year, wanted to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Zeb Welborn 2:09
Well, thank you so much. So we are very excited about that opportunity. Thank you for the opportunity to chat with you here today. Yeah, we’re our team is very excited about it. And then let’s see something interesting about myself. I was a national champion soccer player back in my younger days, and I bowled the 300. So those are the two things that I have on my resume that are not on my resume. Wow.

Brandon Burton 2:35
So you’re not competitive at all right?

Zeb Welborn 2:40
Yeah, there’s definitely a little competitive streak in me for sure. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 2:43
that’s awesome. Those are, those are two really cool facts. So tell us a little bit about the Chino Valley Chamber just to give us an idea of the scope of work size staff budget to kind of preface for our conversation today.

Zeb Welborn 2:57
Sure, so the Chino Valley Chamber represents two cities, we represent Chino and Chino Hills, both of them have a population of I think around 95,000 or so. So it’s almost 200,000 people. It’s a high growth area. So there’s like Chino was named one of the top 10 boom towns in the boom towns in the country, either last year or the year before. I have friends that come out from the military, they’ll be back in town every two or three years in the city looks totally different every time it comes out. So we’re we’re in the suburbs of LA and in Orange County. So all of the people that are working in those areas have kind of shifted out to where we live. Our budget is about $1.1 million. We have about eight staff members. When I started our budget was about $150,000. And we had three part time members including myself, so that was about six years ago. So we’ve grown a lot in the last six years as a as a community but also as the chamber. So that’s something that I am super proud of is kind of helping our chamber turnarounds and challenges they’re facing when I got brought in and now we’re kind of rocking and rolling. And I’m super proud of the work that that that I’ve done but also that our team has accomplished as well. Ya know, that

Brandon Burton 4:12
is something to be proud of for sure. That’s some some great growth. And I will say I I lived in South Orange County for a while and it seemed like everybody was moving out your direction. So I’ve seen the growth you know, almost firsthand I’ll say secondhand, you know, seeing a lot of people we knew moving out your direction. Yeah, lots of growth though. Lots of opportunity. So on these chamber, their finalist episodes we’d like to spend the majority of our conversation most of the time in this interview talking about the two programs that were submitted on your chamber the your application. So we’ll we’ll dive in deep on what those two those two programs are as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Alright, Zeb we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re going to spend some time talking about the two programs that were on your application for chamber the year. So introduce this with the first program is that you’d like to highlight with us today.

Zeb Welborn 7:01
So I’m hoping I can remember that too. We do a lot of different programs. But one of them for sure is our upskill Chino Valley program. So that is one that we initiated two or three years ago, and it was to address the needs of our workforce development shortage in our area. So right after COVID. I mean, when COVID happened, we’re very proactive to making sure that our business had access to resources have access to all of the things that they needed. And so we got a lot of recognition for the work that we did during that time. And a lot of businesses, you know, stayed in business because of the work that we were able to do at that point in time. But then immediately following, as you’re driving around town, you would see just help wanted signs everywhere. So our community had help wanted signs everywhere. Everybody was doing hiring. So you know, that was a big challenge facing our businesses. So then, concurrently, I was taking some classes with the US Chamber, and some other just other professional development learnings. And I came to realize that this workforce development shortage, and this is a stuff that they would teach us to the US Chamber is that this is going to be impacting communities for a while. There’s kind of this forecast of the 10 years of challenges, at least when it comes to workforce and finding good qualified workers. So that’s one of the things that we wanted to try to tackle for our community, how can we make sure that we were being better to better supportive of our businesses to help find their workforce needs. So we looked at it in the short term, but we also looked at in the long term, so trying to create solutions in the short term and long term. So we came up with four things that we thought that if we executed on these things, it would help not only solve the short term issues, but it would help solve the long term issues. So the short term issue is workforce development. So we started doing a lot of job fairs, a lot of one on one placements, we started partnering with our workforce, San Bernardino County Workforce Development, our local Chaffey College, our local school district. So we created these partnerships, we’re trying to build a pipeline of workers for our businesses. And so through that we’ve placed at least 350 job seekers in local jobs in our community, we have helped place at least 100 I want to say about 100 interns from the high school and college level with local businesses to help build the next generation of workforce in our businesses, and and build those connections between business owners and leaders and in the educational institutions that are around us. We did a lot of work with Chaffey College to help make sure that we’re building those strong connections. So that’s a short term solution, I think, or means short term and long term. But then the longer the more longer term. approaches were three things. So it was economic development. These are things that chambers normally do but economic development, leadership development and entrepreneurship development. So economic development, well we started doing was these roundtable discussions. So we’re doing two a month where we’re bringing in businesses from a specific sector or specific industry, or we’re bringing cross industries together, identifying pain points, and then creating action items and our chamber can take action on. So we’ve been doing that extensively for the last two years or so we’re about two years into our program. The next one is leadership development, we did not have a leadership program in our community. So we started one. So leadership developed, we have 25 leaders, we go and tour different business locations and sites around town connecting our businesses with business owners that are running some of the larger businesses in town and making sure that our leadership is strong. If you don’t have strong leaders, you’re gonna have employees that leave. So we want to make sure we develop strong leaders in our community. And then the last thing is entrepreneurship development, which is just enhancing the work that we do and are educating businesses on how to be better in business. So I think one of the gaps is where we’re making sure that we have business owners training, the business leaders that are coming up in our community and making sure that we’re having business owners training our up and coming entrepreneurs in our community.

Brandon Burton 11:03
So with that, the two that really stood out to me is the leadership development. So I know we have a leadership development and entrepreneur development. So with the leadership development, have you guys gotten to gotten through to full classes yet? Or where are you at in that, that process? And what does it look like at this point with the leadership development? Yeah, so

Zeb Welborn 11:26
we’re just about to finish year two, it’s been a great successful opportunity. Oh, and I didn’t mention this in the beginning. But that upskill Chino Valley program, we essentially pitched it to one of our legislators, and so they allocated a million dollars of state funding towards our programming. So that allows us to execute on this work. It’s a lot of work to do that stuff. And so I’m always like, how, how can we get the funding to actually execute on his work? So we pitched that, and that was something that they thought was needed for our community. So we were able to secure those which allowed us to do all this work. So this is our second year, we, our first year was highly successful, one of the things that we commit to doing as a community good project during that leadership program as well. So they do something good for the community. Last year, they bought AED machines to help in case somebody goes into cardiac arrest, we put them in three different businesses around town. So there’s a cost that was incurred that so we helped raise that those funds for that. This year, we’re doing helping our local community theater or children’s community theater. So we’re raising funds so that they can train more kids in the in the theatrical arts. And and it’s been, it’s been great. So yeah, you’re too we’re almost done. We got about two months left. Awesome.

Brandon Burton 12:40
And then with the entrepreneurial development, I’m always curious with entrepreneurs, and how to how chambers get connected with him in the first place to match them up with other business owners. And you know, a lot of times entrepreneurs have that bug of I’m going to do this by myself. Yeah, I can. I’m going to figure this out. And it tends to be the hard path, right? So what what are some of the ways you guys are connecting with entrepreneurs and helping to kind of bring them out and connect them with the right people.

Zeb Welborn 13:09
So I feel like I feel like I’m an entrepreneur, right. So I joined actually joined my chamber as a member back in like 2010, or 2011 or so. And when I joined, what I was looking for was mentors, I was I didn’t want to make those mistakes. I wanted to find people in my community that I could look up to that I could learn from. And there’s a couple of people that I thought of like there was a guy that ran our newspaper, there’s also the guy that ran the local golf course. So these are two guys that I was kind of hoping to connect with. And they were they were loosely connected to the chamber. So I joined the chamber not knowing when the chamber really was good. But I thought like, what I was really looking for was the business organization that I could turn to that I could get mentorship. And there wasn’t really anything in my community except for the Chamber of Commerce. So when I came across the chamber, and I kind of went into the first day, it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. But there wasn’t anything else. And so my thought was was well either I could work like a you try to make that happen inside of the chamber community. Or I could try it like you said, do it on my own. So I obviously opted to get involved in my chamber and see if there are ways that I can help make this a system that worked out well for people like me, they get to come into business and get advice and mentorship from successful business owners. So that’s one of the things that I’ve had a passion for since I started and and now we’re, we’re we’re doing that. So we’re trying to there’s lots of different ways to go about doing that. I’ll share that we do a lot of business trainings and business development. So we do a business workshop. It used to be once a week, but we’re doing it once every other week. Right now, because we found that that cadence worked out better for our members, but we are trying to shift some strategies around to offer more. One of the exciting things that has happened for us and this is very new. So this was before I submitted our proposal was we just got accepted. So we submitted an appropriations request for an audit To bring an entrepreneurship center into our community that would be facilitated and managed by the chamber. So that’s something that we submitted for it’s been approved through the first phase of the process, we have no idea if it’s actually going to get funded or not. But at least it’s very exciting because that was a selected project out of, I think, 10, or 15, they’re able to choose every year. So we’re one of those 10 or 15. So we’re excited because we feel like that could be a good opportunity for our business, and business community. So that’s something we are excited about. And so we but we’re making ranking progress to try to develop more entrepreneurial programming, to making sure that we are have a space that we can do that stuff with, and that we’re bringing potential entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs and collaboration and connection with people who have made it happen and Bennett themselves here in the Inland Empire. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 15:47
Oh, that is great. And I’m sure along the way, you’re seeing you know, upticks in those different, you know, measurements to be able to see with with workforce, and hopefully seeing a few less help wanted signs and, and being able to fill some of those voids and needs throughout the community. As we kind of shift gears Do you would you like to introduce what the second program is that you guys submitted on your chamber, the your application?

Zeb Welborn 16:18
So if I had to guess I would say was the entrepreneur, the leadership program that we discussed already. So that was the part of it. So that leadership program is something that we are very proud of? It has, we have, we’re coming up on 50 graduates in the next two months, and I think it was just something that was missing in our community that we really needed. And that we wanted to. Yeah, it was just that there’s been a lot of things that have happened in our community that are kind of ostracized, ostracize people from one another. And when we bring people together, prior to those situations happening, solutions come together much more quickly, their people are able to collaborate much more better. And so building these relationships and connections with these different entities in town just plays a huge role in making sure that our community can stay connected, and looking at opportunities to focus on growth versus opportunities, where we’re looking for division amongst each other. So that’s something that we’re excited about the the collaborative work that we’ve been doing with our businesses, making sure they’re connected with our city and, and legislators and educational institutions, and all those things. When we do that. We feel like we’re doing really good work.

Brandon Burton 17:29
Yeah. So I love leadership programs and the whole purpose behind them. And I know every chamber has a little slightly different approach and how they go about it. But do you guys put a limit on how many, how many participants? How many students are involved with leadership programs? Is there an application process? Who reviews that? What? What’s it like to become part of the leadership class?

Zeb Welborn 17:52
Yeah, so we do, we do have like an interview process. So it’s, the number is 25 that we shoot for. And that’s because, you know, some of our touring locations have a restriction on how many people can go through it. So we found that 25 is a good number, because it’s manageable. And also, we’re able to tour the sites with one visit versus multiple visits. So that’s been a good number for us. They do do an interview. So they have to be interviewed and selected in and we actually went, I went through the corona leadership, the corona Chamber Leadership Program. So I kind of modeled a lot of what we do after them. And my understanding is, is that they model it after the Riverside chamber. So we still in use a lot of stuff from each other. But that’s, that’s what we do. And then we don’t really do any leadership training, we mostly build collaboration and connection and do tour visits. So we go visit different locations, give these business owners an opportunity to talk about their business and the work that they do. And then they provide a tour to our members, they get back behind the scenes look at what other organizations and businesses have to go through on a daily basis to make sure that their operation runs successfully. And so when you do that, there’s a lot of eye opening things that happen you realize how intricate and how much goes into these businesses and organizations. And so it gives gives people a bigger perspective. I mean, the biggest thing though, the biggest advantage is just the collaboration and connection is built because we’ve seen firsthand how many people get connected with each other for bigger projects that help support our community and a high one, which is we had somebody who was going through our program. She’s a leadership coach or professional business coach, and we toured our local so we have the California institution for men is located in our community. So we toured the prison and while we’re touring the prison, she got connected with somebody who was Aristotle I got in the I would love to speak to your your inmates to talk about you know, things that they can do to turn their life around and So she gets she came in and spoke to the I guess it was a large contingent was maybe like 100 200 inmates about leadership and challenges. And so that was a connection that was built through that. And because of that, I feel like it did good things for our community for the inmates that were there for the business owner. That was the business coach that was going through it. And so it’s just kind of like a win win win. That was a result of the work that we helped facilitate.

Brandon Burton 20:25
That’s really cool. So throughout the year, the leadership program, but how many visits site visits do you guys do? Or do you shoot for?

Zeb Welborn 20:34
Yeah, it’s what we go once a month, and it’s three site visits a day, so. So it’s one day, it’s about a full day. So they started around nine, and a three, so not not quite a full day, but nine to three, and we visit three different locations. So we’ll do one or two in the morning, and then we’ll have lunch, and then we’ll do one in the afternoon. And then we call it a day. Sometimes it’s fuck. It’ll move around based on the sites that we’re visiting. But that’s kind of the rough outline.

Brandon Burton 21:05
Yeah. And then just out of curiosity, how are you selecting the sites to go visit? Is it based on the applicants are just trying to figure out needs or what what goes into that thought process?

Zeb Welborn 21:17
So I’ll say it’s industry specific, we look, you know, we want to highlight each of the image industries that are represented in our community. So the first couple of days is with our city. So we go toward the behind the scenes of the cities. And then we have a healthcare day, there’s a Manufacturing Day, there’s a logistics day, there’s a small business day. What else do we do? Well, we visit public safety. So we have kind of a Public Safety Day. So I guess, those are the things that we do try to focus on. And we tried to make them days so that there’s a theme behind them, but sometimes just the way that the visits work out, we’ll move them around. But that’s the main gist. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 21:56
I like that idea, though, having a theme for for those visits each day. And kind of building the mindset around that about why is public safety important in our community. And as a developing leader, how does that play into my development and being able to make those connections going forward. So I see that across the board with the different themes that you guys tried to target. So I appreciate that. So I’d like asking everyone that I have on the podcast, especially as you guys are a chamber, the year finalist this year, kind of at the top of your game, so to speak. It, I’d like to see if there’s any kind of tip or action item that you might offer for chambers out there who were interested in taking their chamber to the next level.

Zeb Welborn 22:46
Well, when I saw when I joined the chamber that thing, as a as a member, I just remember thinking like this is not the hub of the business community. This is not what I was anticipating being like the business organization that represents business. And I don’t know if that’s the same case, for chambers across the place, I guess what how I would describe it is, when I showed up to different meetings and stuff, it was a lot of people that had retired from their careers. And we’re kind of doing a second career to make income on the side. So I was by like the youngest person by 30 years that was participating in those programs. It didn’t have the people that were running like big successful businesses in town participating in those programs. And so in my mind, I was saying like, like, this doesn’t make any sense to me, like there should be a way that business owners in a community can come together to support one another to grow the business community at large. So that’s kind of like, I guess, just my thought when I was coming into it. And so I’ve just worked really hard on trying to build that. So I think the thing that surprises me sometimes is the approach some of my colleagues make is, like, I looked at us as leaders of our business community. And so when I say leaders, one, we should not be operating the best business in our community. So we should have be running the most successful business in town, we shouldn’t be modeling that business behavior to our business owners, and then we should be compensated like successful business owners. And so when I started my role, like there was no way I could live in my community with the salary that they were offering. And so, but it’s not just like given to us, like we have to work for it. We have to be those leaders in business, we have to run a successful business. And then if we do run a successful business, we have to seek compensation for the work that we do in that regard. So I think that’s my one piece of advice is treat it like a business, be proactive and growing that business. And then if you focus on doing those two things, I think you’re gonna be putting yourself in a great position to lead your business community because you’re modeling what it is to be a successful business and your businesses will will learn from that more than they would if you’re just trying to help them and suffering at the expense of supporting your local businesses. I think it’s important to model successful business behavior to the members of the chamber. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 25:06
And I think yeah, at our heart, I think most people know that and believe that, but to hear it said, and to kind of reinvigorate that, yes, we do need to be that model that template to be able to show how to run a good business. So then businesses can look to you and trust what you have to say, if it builds trust in the within the business community. If you’re just a hot mess of a chamber, it’s really hard to, to get buy in as a business to think that this chamber knows what to do you know what to offer me any kind of advice or anything like that. As we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Zeb Welborn 25:55
So that’s a good question. I, I mean, I see it, and I’ll just speak for my community, right, I saw a lot of opportunity when I came in, like, I feel like I’m an entrepreneur, and then I kind of moved towards where the opportunities are most prevalent. I feel like there is a great opportunity for Chambers of Commerce right now. I think that everybody is trying to get connected with business owners. And there’s a lot of light, and I’ll just say like federal funding, but it’s not just federal funding, it’s even like, when you’re running your business getting connected with business owners, it’s not an easy thing to do. Businesses are more strapped than ever for time. And I’ll say that attribute that to the internet, social media, digital marketing, you’re on 24/7. Whereas in prior to the internet, you did not have to be on 24/7, you could work the normal workdays, and then you have the evenings and weekends off. And and now if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re you’re grinding it out 24/7. And that’s how I’ve been doing it for the last 10 years. So I just know how busy chambers have. I know how busy businesses are, but they do need people to speak up for them in these roles and capacities. And so we’ve been participating in these collaboratives, where there’s like this, this federal funding that is coming or the state funding that is coming for programs that are designed to help support businesses, yet there are zero businesses at the table in these conversations. So that’s where everybody is trying to talk to business owners, but business owners don’t have time to sit around and waste time in these meetings that seem really unproductive and don’t get anything accomplished. Even though there is going to be a strong outcome at the end, they don’t have the time to invest in that type of work. So they need a representative, those organizations that are looking to support business community, they need a representative. And so chambers are uniquely positioned in a way where we have immediate access to the businesses that are represented through our membership. And we can turn and talk to them. And we can pick up the phone and they will answer and they will respond to our emails, and they will get in touch with us. And that’s what is needed by a lot of these entities trying to get in touch with businesses. So I think I see a lot of opportunity, I still see a lot of opportunity for our chamber and the work that we’re doing. And I feel like other chambers have that same opportunity as well. Yeah, I like that.

Brandon Burton 28:07
I like that response was that I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners out there who may want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you guys are doing things there at the Chino Valley Chamber, what would be the best ways for them to reach out and connect with you.

Zeb Welborn 28:25
So my business got me involved in chamber was social media marketing. So I was fairly early on the social media marketing train, so you can find me very easily. My dad was a reporter for the Orange County Register. So I think he named me with the intention of that my name would make a great byline in a news story, you know, like the the article by Warren. So nobody has my name, Zeb Welborn, you can find me anywhere @zebwelborn, I am on all the socials. And I’d be happy to connect with you if anybody wants to chat or ask any questions. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 29:02
that was very kind of your father do give you a name that nobody else says. Well, it’s

Zeb Welborn 29:08
it’s good and bad. So if I if I if there’s something that comes up bad about me, it’s very easy to find. But if if I’m doing good work, then that’s also easy to find as well. So it’s a is that?

Brandon Burton 29:20
The right path? Right? Yeah, exactly. I

Zeb Welborn 29:22
don’t think it was thinking about the digital marketing age where you can search up, you do Google searches. That wasn’t a thing back then. But yeah, for sure.

Brandon Burton 29:30
That’s right. That was it. I appreciate it. It’s been fun having you on the podcast today and learning where you guys are doing there it’s Chino Valley Chamber and make an impact in your community. And I wish you and your team the best of luck is chamber the year.

Zeb Welborn 29:43
Awesome. Thank you very much.

Brandon Burton 29:46
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