Running into the Fire of Advocacy with Brad Hicks

Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Brad Hicks. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but I thought it could still be useful to search text within this podcast episode.

Introduction

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

Voiceover Talent 0:14
Now your host, his favorite chewy candies are Swedish Fish. Here’s my dad Brandon Burton

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

Our title sponsor for this episode is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Is your chamber struggling to drive the revenue it needs to support your initiatives? It’s a common problem and one that our new title Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions knows a lot about Doug and Bill Holman aren’t just sales consultants. They’re real life chamber guys with 20 plus years of chamber leadership experience. They know how to diagnose and solve member recruiting issues faster and better than anyone else. And they’re ready to put that knowledge to work for you and your chamber. Call the Harmon Brothers today at 61985 to 1391. Or check them out at HolmanBros.com. That’s holmanbros.com.

Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Brad Hicks. Brad is the newly retired or rewired president and CEO of the Chamber of Medford Jackson County in Oregon, a position he held since the end of 1999. Brad began his career at the chamber in 1993. He has been called and with good reason Southern Oregon’s business leader. Under his direction, the chamber has embraced a new era of business leadership that blends the best of traditional chamber with today’s necessity for top notch and powerful business advocacy. During his tenure at the helm, the chamber has grown into one of Oregon’s largest and longest standing statewide business associations. Brad is often sought out for his perspective on business and political issues, and has been featured on the CBS Early Show, Fox News, the Los Angeles Times San Francisco Chronicle, fortune, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and he can now add the chamber chat podcast to this impressive list. Today as a result of Brad’s leadership, the chamber continues to support pro business policies that will provide enduring benefits for the state economy and as a member of the US Chamber of Commerce Committee of 100. He is widely regarded as one of the top influencers in the Oregon political landscape and the chamber industry in the United States. Brad recently completed a successful term as chairman of the board for WACE Brad enjoys travel and investing his time in Southern Oregon. He and his wife Kimberly have one son Jonathan. Well Brad I’m excited to have you with me today on the chamber chat podcast you’ve come highly recommended by a couple different people but I would take take a few moments 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.

Something Interesting about Brad

Brad Hicks 3:28
Something interesting well Brandon, first thank you and and you’re gonna have to pick better friends if they’re recommending me for your podcast. Some poor judgment out there apparently. And Happy, Happy Constitution Day. Not a lot of people think about that or celebrate that. But you know, what was it 234 years ago today? A few few folks got together and signed I think now the longest lasting constitution in human history. So it’s, it’s being ignored, but it’s still standing. So happy times. today. Um, maybe that’s something interesting. Well, I don’t know if that’s interesting or not gonna say maybe that’s something interesting about myself as I’m, I’m kind of a junkie on board. political history, but, um, let’s see, what would what would be a thing. Well, you can see some of the stuff behind me one of the things just out of view for you. Brandon is a really old, tattered baseball. And it’s a homerun ball that I hit at a Pittsburgh Pirates mini camp or try out off of their number one draft

Brandon Burton 4:50
pick. Nice. That is pretty cool.

Brad Hicks 4:53
Yeah, that was that was my 15 seconds of fame. I guess.

Brandon Burton 4:59
You must Have some kind of a background in baseball? I would assume.

Brad Hicks 5:04
No, I picked the wrong parking lot. And I just walked out there and grabbed a bat. And No, I’m kidding. Yeah, baseball was, was one of my early interests and spent spent a lot of time on and around baseball diamonds. And and I hope to I hope to get to do some more of that in the future.

Brandon Burton 5:26
Watching. They’re watching and well, at this point, I’d like for you to share a little bit about the chamber that you just recently retired from, I understand you’re still doing quite a bit of close work with. And I’d like to just get some perspective as to the type of size staff, that sort of thing. And we’ll go to that point.

About The Chamber of Medford/Jackson County

Brad Hicks 5:52
Yeah, well, some of this, you know, might be repeat for a lot of my friends after 30 years in the industry, I’ve got a lot of friends in the chamber biz around the country, but so many of them know, but I suppose Many don’t. My background before coming to the chamber was in the legislative arena. I had run a house office and two senate offices in the state legislature and then worked for one of our members of Congress, and was pretty active in the campaign. On the campaign circuit, I always say everything from dog catcher to President of the United States. I’ve been on or run campaigns and a lot of levels. But I wanted to move home to Southern Oregon, my mother was in poor health, and I wanted to be closer to my family. And, and I thought, well, I’ll go home and see what somebody my age and limited experience can do in Southern Oregon. So I drove around, I was joking, I drove around looking for buildings with domes on them, because that’s all I’d ever worked in. And I couldn’t find once I dropped, dropped a resume off at the chamber. And the rest is history I I was familiar with our specific chamber, because I was the staff person on the other end of the line setting up legislative hotlines for chamber member or for our legislative members with this chamber. And so I knew that there was a high degree of interest in issue advocacy at our chamber, and I thought well, maybe, you know, maybe that’s someplace I could play my trade. And you know, here we are almost 30 years later, just putting a period or maybe an exclamation point on the end of it.

Brandon Burton 7:58
You’ve been doing since retiring, but what do you been up to?

Brad Hicks 8:05
Well, I remember my dad making a statement, and I thought it was the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. But after he retired to continue to care for my mother. He said, I don’t know how I ever had time to work. And I’m finding I’m finding that he was right. There seems to be so much to do. In fact, sometimes I kind of wish I had to go to the office. Because there seems to be so many things to do that I was previously unaware of, that are now on my calendar and my to do list. But you know, you mentioned this at the top of the show. I am I set up a consultancy called RBI I had to get a baseball reference in there. That’s right. Because we all know business and in politics, if you don’t score runs, you don’t win. And so I chose RBI because I think, you know RBI is runs batted in are one of the under some statistics and baseball people like to talk about diving catches and Grand Slam home runs. But again, you’ve got to you’ve got to knock some runs across the plate to win. But RBI also stands for representing business issues. And you know, that was something that years ago came out of the WAC tool, toolkit work that we did. And it was, it was one of the most important things that chamber members said they want their chambers to do for them represent business issues, through lobbying, issue advocacy, and political action. Candidate work, right recruiting, financing and electing pro business candidates and I hope we get to talk a little bit more about Because that’s the real passion. And and if I could just quickly circling back, you asked me to kind of recap my time at the history, what I didn’t say was, when I started at the chamber, we had just about 1000 members. And we mean, that had been a number that we have maintained for a pretty long period of time, we had been just under just over 1000 members for a long time. And even through my first, you know, six or seven years as a staff person at the chamber, we were a basically 1000 member chamber. I knew if we were going to gain clout in the political arena, from my days working in the legislature, you know, is typically the 800 pound gorillas that that get the most attention. So you’ve either got to be really big or have a lot of money, I knew we wouldn’t have a lot of money. So I set out to make our chamber larger. And over about a six year period of time, we went from about 1000 members to over 1700 members, which made us one of the eight largest chambers on the west coast. And certainly the largest chamber in the state of Oregon, even larger than our state association at the time. So suddenly, when you pick up the phone, and you call the governor’s office, or you know, some representatives office, if they’re paying attention to how many folks you represent, they take the call they take the meeting.

Brandon Burton 11:34
Yeah, there’s a lot more clout for sure. Yep. And talk about runs batted in. 1000 to 1700 members, those are a lot of runs coming in,

Brad Hicks 11:45
that we pushed a lot of runs across the plate over that period of time. And and that was a real, it was a real fun time to be part of our chambers history. Because not only were we growing, but we were really getting a lot of things done. And and then of course, nobody needs to be reminded that, you know, then we went headlong into a great recession, lifted our heads up for a little bit and then went, you know, headlong into a global pandemic and in our region, catastrophic wildfires. So there, there have been a lot of things beyond our control that you know, that have torn, torn down a lot of the work, a lot of things that we built, have been knocked over, but I’m confident in our community and our members and our chamber and the people that are on the team now that they’ll be able to rebuild that in time.

Brandon Burton 12:48
Are you looking for a year round affordable and timely shop local campaign for your chamber or CVB Look no further build a custom each shop play mobile app with App My Community by visiting appmycommunity.com/chamberchat. App My Community mobile apps are not just simple membership directory listings. They provide many more capabilities to engage with your community. Provide your residents with a robust events calendar partner with a local fare festival or Farmers Market provide a schedule map and other resources to promote the event. Run a Small Business Saturday campaign any time of the year using built in scavenger hunts allow your membership to communicate directly to their customers via push notifications. Your app my community mobile app will be a unique member benefit allow you to generate non dues revenue with sponsorship opportunities and best of all provide a valuable resource to your community please visit appmycommunity.com/chamberchat now to receive 10% off your first year of an App My Community mobile app.

Topic-Running into the Fires of Advocacy

So you happen to mention the the wildfires there in Oregon and throughout the West Coast really and we’ll kind of use that to segue into our topic for running into the fire of advocacy in our band for all you had mentioned to me that during this time especially that you’re running away from the opportunity that they have to really shine yeah I and and a few that are running into the fire so tell us what you mean. Yeah,

Brad Hicks 14:37
yeah, well, you know, you talk to you live in the Pacific Northwest, you talk to a lot of firefighters and BLM folks and forestry folks over the course of a career and and you know, there’s this this idea of, you know, those who run away from the fire and those who run into the fire and and I was thinking about that as a metaphor for chambers and Their approach to Well, sometimes even issue advocate advocacy, but certainly the area of political action, recruiting candidates, pro business candidates who are going to do well, or they’re going to do good by our members as opposed to doing harm. You know, in our industry, we are regularly pulled, what’s the most important issue in your community? What do you think’s the most important member of issue to your members? Who knows? I mean, at the end of the day, who knows, here’s what I do know, there’s nothing more important than who decides on those issues. I mean, at the end of the day, those issues are those issues, and they’re going to confront our, our communities. Whether we like it or not, issues of land use and issues of wildfire and issues of homelessness and issues of, of poverty and, and education or lack thereof. You know, we’re all tackling really difficult issues. And our individual chambers are not always going to be the lead voice on those issues. In fact, quite often, not the lead voice, just a contributor in the choir, to that overall voice. But where we can make a big difference is helping choose who gets to decide who decides in your, on your city council, who decides your Board of Commissioners in your state legislature, what the best thing is on those, you know, the best direction on those policy issues. So we took this approach, I remember the day we actually got our board to approve because the first time I proposed it, it failed. And that was the formation of our political action committee. But I think when I said this in the second go around, I think it resonated with people, if you want to change the policy, you’ve got to change the people. And and the point that I made that I think resonated with our own board was this for 100 years prior to the time I made that statement and pitched a pack to our organization. Our organization had a long and successful record of issue advocacy. I mean, I found records going back 100 years where we were arguing about wildfire, you know, forest management issues and transportation. And so we have this long, rich history of being pretty good on the issue advocacy side, but never played on the candidate side of the ledger. And, and I, you know, finally occurred to me, all of our best issue advocacy efforts are being frustrated by the wrong people getting elected.

Brandon Burton 18:14
Yeah, so that really stood out to me when you want to change the policy need to change the people. I’m thinking I can’t pinpoint many, many times where I’ve seen a politician have. If you need the policy to change, you need to change the people. Right? I’m curious, right? I’m curious in your area, I mean, you guys worked hard to become big to become a chamber that has impact to be heard by some of these people in government on the some of these issues. And with that, so you’ve got a lot of power is a responsibility, right to represent those businesses as business issues as RBI is? In today’s world, things have obviously become very polar, divisive when it comes to politics. So as a chamber, as a chamber, how do you try to balance that, by I know, some would have a fear of maybe losing membership losing some support, when overall you can see the path? And yeah, it may have some collateral damage. I mean, what has how do you go about that in your mind?

Brad Hicks 19:28
Well, I grew up in a family, a small business family, my parents were small town grocers, and I watched them go bankrupt in the recession of the early 80s. And a lot of that fueled my passion and my heart for small business people in the issues that they face. And I think that’s ultimately how I wound up at the chamber and why I had so much passion and energy for the issues that help businesses succeed and and the issues that They kill business and thwart business and thwart free enterprise. So I always you know, when I walked in the door I my attitude was I am never going to apologize for defending our members and for defending free enterprise I’m just not going to do it there’s there’s a lot of negotiables but I’m not going to apologize for standing up for the issues that make our members successful. The you know, any of my friends that are listening to this know that I’m kind of a keeper of quotes. And I particularly love Winston Churchill and and he said there’s no greater thrill than being shot at to no effect. So, so what you have to know is, this is this is who I am, this is who my organization is, this is the mission of the organization unapologetically. This is the mission of my organization. And we are going to go out and we’re going to say and do things that benefit the people that pay the freight. Whether other people like it or not, and it isn’t that you go out and, and endeavor or purpose to make enemies. If you can do that in a collaborative and a friendly way. Great. But you’re exactly right. It’s it is a road full of bumps and potholes. You know, what’s the other quote john wayne said courage is being afraid but saddling up anyway. Yeah, you know, organizationally, we spent sometimes weeks talking about whether or not we were even the right organization to carry a message. like is this Are we going to marginalize this message because it’s got the Chamber’s name attached to it? Or you know, here we are in the middle of a membership or a fundraising development campaign and we’re going to take an issue on our position on the most controversial issue in our whole state do we or don’t we and I’m so proud of our you know, board over the last 30 years and our staff and to say you know, whenever we were faced with those situations every time without fail we walked into the fire

Brandon Burton 22:30
I love that and I think this is one of those topics that a chamber can really if they’re listening they can really get some value out of to really what is best for their businesses for their members to really see like you said having those pro business candidates elected support them. Yeah, make a stance and see how your members support you. I mean, for those for those chambers that hear members say I don’t know what my chamber for something that’s going to support these businesses that are your members, they’ll remember that when the time comes around.

Brad Hicks 23:09
Well Brandon, you are exactly right. And you know, to put it in different terms, instead of walking into a running away from the fire art stuff. I could probably just simplify it by say by saying it’s easy to look at things from our own perspective in defense of your chamber safety, what’s easier, what’s harder, and all those sorts of our members want us to be proactive? Right? And silence equals indifference. So you might be sitting at your chamber saying there is no way we’re going to endorse candidates because it’s risky it’s scary What if the wrong person gets elected and they hate me and they kill our budget? Are they take away our contract? Or you know, and what I don’t hear people asking when we have these conversations you know, what if what if I lost my contract with the city but 500 businesses in my community join the chamber as a result of of actually finally meaning something to them? What if I didn’t need that contract anymore? Or what if what if standing up for you know a principle that got you in a fight over your contract and you win it or you lose it you know, I think chambers have to remember that it’s probably more important to be respected than to be liked when it comes to these types of issues and and doing the right thing is you know, it’s gonna get you’re gonna at least get you’re respected.

Brandon Burton 24:52
So it takes a lot of courage, a lot of faith, I would say to step up Something anything to have that integrity? How would you suggest a chamber? And I don’t know how you just grow integrity like that. But how do you step up to that challenge against the, you know, the headwinds that come atcha?

Brad Hicks 25:19
Well, I think you’re right. And I want to be careful not to sound like I’m patting myself on the back, I would just, I think, to try to objectively answer your question, I, I don’t know that you gain that on the job, I think you bring it with you. Right? So it’s probably up to boards to make sure they’re hiring people who have courage, who have integrity, who aren’t afraid to, you know, run into the fire, and then turn them loose and let them do the right thing. So I’d like to think that in my case, those were traits or characteristics that I brought with me, you know, it wasn’t like one day I just said, Hey, this integrity thing seems I you know, I listen to john wooden and this integrity thing seems pretty cool. I gotta get me one of those. It just, you know, for me, defending business. And, and helping people like my folks, but not go bankrupt, was kind of a true north for me. And, and I guess I didn’t waver. And I’m proud of that. So, and I’m proud of our organization, because you have to, you’ve got to have a staff and you got to have a board who are all in. And so, you know, I don’t know, you know, you asked about how you how you get the integrity to do that. You know, that those, those are characteristics people have to bring to the table, what you really need first, to get started as guts. And you have to know you’re, you’re going to get punched in the teeth every once in a while and be willing to take it. What it might usually quote Mike Tyson, but you know, what, if you say everybody’s got a fight plan to get punched in the mouth or something, right? You know, and so your board and your staff has to say, we’re going to go into the ring, we’re going to, we’re going to throw a few and we’re going to take a few and when we take one, we can’t go in the corner and curl up and suck our thumb, we got to go back out and answer the bell.

Brandon Burton 27:50
That’s right. You know, I had heard a quote one time that said, If you want to change policy, you got to, personally that that might have to apply to chambers, too. So if you don’t have that integrity, if you can’t summon up those guts, and watch out, you know,

Brad Hicks 28:05
oh, you know, this is something that good friends of mine, like the late Mike McLaren and, and Dave Kilby, who is still living. And I have been saying for years, and it’s really a page we store up stole out of good degrade. And that is you got to have the right butts in the seats. Right? So you think about this bus, and people are on the bus, and people are off the bus. And people ought to get off the bus, you know, that are on it, and cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to have you know, if you have a board, for example, that’s made up of, you know, half your board is made up of bureaucrats and city officials or county officials. And then suddenly, you want to be bold and take on the city and the county, it’s going to be tough. And if you’re the CEO, you might actually be the, the victim of, of that newfound boldness. So you got to make sure that you’ve got so you got to be bold, but you’ve got to you’ve got to get the right players on the team or in the clubhouse or on the bus, however you want to put it.

Brandon Burton 29:24
Absolutely. So I know we’re we’re starting to get a little bit short on time, but I wanted to ask a couple of these questions that I like to ask everyone that I have on the show. What would be maybe one tip or action item based on our discussion today, that edge chamber champion could do to help elevate their organization up to the next level.

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Brad Hicks 29:52
You know, we have a tendency I think in the chamber of business to think if we’re not planting a flag on the moon, we didn’t do something big Right, I hear it a lot. And you know, we weren’t always a big chamber, maybe we were a medium sized chamber. But I have always had such great admiration for the small chambers in our country. And I tell my friends that run small chambers, I appreciate them, and sometimes envied them. Especially once we became a large chamber, because they do it all right, they have to, they have to do it all they play every role that wherever we have, they’ve got to be much more creative sometimes than those of us that have a little bit more in the way of resources or people. But, you know, if you think about what Tip O’Neill said, all politics is local. So you’re asking me like, what’s the thing? What’s some thing that that a chamber could do to make a difference? Don’t think that you have to be like the Medford, Jackson County Chamber or the Sacramento chamber or the Seattle chamber, the Vegas chamber, cetera, et cetera. Maybe you have a great city council and a bad mayor. And the chamber says, You know what, we’re, we’re going to go out and recruit one of our past chairs, to run for mayor, we’re going to help her win, we’re going to raise the money, and we’re going to create a team. And we’re going to get a good mayor who actually cares about the business people. That one thing could be the biggest thing that happens in a particular community. And they didn’t have to elect somebody, President of the United States or to Congress or land somebody on the moon. They simply changed one of the most important positions in their community. And quite frankly, on a relative scale that might be more important than some of the work we do.

Brandon Burton 31:56
Right? Yeah, absolutely. We’re,

Brad Hicks 31:58
we’re, you know, historically, we’re usually in 10, or 12. legislative races, every election cycle. And we have probably, I’m trying to be conservative here, but I bet our success rate, it’s, it’s 95% Plus, it might be 97, or 98. I’m just gonna say 95. To be conservative. You know, we always seem to lose one. Every, every cycle. And that’s because we’ve got a couple of districts that just don’t don’t benefit pro business candidates. But we give them hell in those do, right? We we don’t stop we don’t let that stop us from recruiting candidates and, and raising money. In fact, I know we’re running out of time, but I want to share this because it’s an example I use almost every time some other you know, fellow chamber exec asked me what what happens when you lose longtime incumbent senator, not a friend of the chambers, not a friend of local business, but continue to get elected and one of these districts I referred to, so we recruited somebody, and we raised over 100,000 bucks, and we lost by about 280 votes, 260 bucks, something like that. And everybody said, Oh, man, grab, you know, grab your grab your hats and hang on because it’s, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride. We never had a better relationship with that, Senator. Until we did that, because he knew we had the we had the the guts, and the capacity to almost take them out for change. Yeah, for change. And if he continued to be that bad, we were going to continue to take another stab at and we did. I mean, we got friendlier and friendlier, but we still try to take him out every time. But the point is, the relationship got better, not worse. Yeah. He he had, he had, I guess you could say, maybe a little bit of a healthy fear of of the chamber and it made him think about his policy decisions more than he ever had prior to that.

The Future of Chambers

Brandon Burton 34:26
That’s good. That’s a really good example. All right, yeah. So as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see their their purpose going forward?

Brad Hicks 34:39
Well, you know, I think you actually said this at the beginning of the show, and it was some It was kind of a mantra for me with our staff and our board. At the beginning of this pandemic. I truly believe that was and still is a time for chambers to shine. There is so much the new And and a lot of people are standing around looking for for someone to do it right? Which way do we go and fingers are pointing and you know 15 different directions What a great time. I don’t like the confusion. I don’t like the uncertainty I know business markets don’t like uncertainty, but what a great time for chambers chamber boards chamber CEOs to step in and provide the kind of leadership that people are looking for not just chamber members of business, businesses in general and communities in general. We we established a policy during the pandemic we were not going to turn anybody away we’re a membership organization we do things for members historically, during the pandemic I told our team you know don’t don’t play the you’re not a member game. Somebody comes to us in the middle of the night who needs help and they’re ready to close our businesses help them and we we probably got more complimentary phone calls emails and text messages from non members when you know when things started to subside and ease up a little bit we had so many small business people say I would not have made it had it not been for the information the chamber shared about getting my PPP money or you know where to go for this resource or how to find FEMA during the wildfires etc. And that was a real rewarding feeling so you know do the right thing and and I suppose Good, good things will follow.

Brandon Burton 36:44
Like I do the right thing that’s kind of been a bowl episode, right? Yeah. Yeah. So portunity for anybody listening that wanted to reach out and connect with you learn a little bit more from you what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect?

Connect with Brad Hicks

Brad Hicks 37:03
Well as a as I mentioned, my new companies name is RBI or representing business issues. My website still under development, but I can be reached at Brad@representingbusinessissues.com or at 541-210-3334. And always, always have happy to help a fellow chamber exact I obviously this industry is coursing through my veins and I’ll always be a part of it in some capacity and would welcome any any of those phone calls or emails.

Brandon Burton 37:49
Awesome. Well, I will get that in our show notes. But Brad, I’ve enjoyed this conversation with you. I appreciate your integrity and the guts that you’ve shown throughout your career and the family shares he’s shared with us today. And just thank you so much for joining us.

Brad Hicks 38:08
Well thanks for your thanks for what you’re doing to this is it’s fun and I’ve enjoyed watching you interview friends of mine and and was was glad for it to finally be my turn in the barrel.

Brandon Burton 38:24
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.

Would you be interested in creating even more value from the processes that you’re already doing on a daily basis Swypit has been one of my sponsors for chamber chat from the beginning. Swypit provides credit card payment solutions that will save your chamber up to 40% on your processing fees and Swypit can integrate your credit card processing seamlessly into your existing membership software. Swypit that does not charge chambers to switch and they will make switching simple In addition to these savings Swypit that has an affinity program for chambers of commerce so you can earn more non dues revenue to support your budget. Learn more about Swypit by requesting your free cost savings analysis and become more profitable today by visiting chamberchatpodcast.com/cc as in credit card. Again, that’s chamberchatpodcast.com/cc and you can join many other chambers as you begin swiping with Swypit.