Presenting Employment Opportunities to the Classroom with Bret Schanzenbach

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

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Introduction

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

And now, your host. He worked for staples. Well in high school, he’s my dad Brandon Burton.

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

Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Kris Johnson, President and CEO of the Association of Washington Business in Washington State to learn how Holman Brothers has provided value for him. 

Kris Johnson  

Well, Doug and Bill at the Holman Brothers have been a key ally in growth for my professional career working at three different chambers, a local chamber, a regional chamber, now a statewide chamber. And they’ve been the ideal solution, whether it’s a comprehensive training program, whether it’s working on individual sales growth, quarterly check-ins with the team, the ability to grow members has meaning more assets for the organization, more assets means we can do more things to serve our members. They’ve really been the perfect solution for us, a trusted resource partner and a growth partner for us all along the way. So hats off to Doug and Bill for their great success. They’ll be a great partner for you as they are for us.

Brandon Burton  2:03  

You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.

Guest Introduction

You’re joining us today for episode 191 of Chamber Chat Podcast. We are getting up there in the episode numbers. But for this episode, we have Brett Johnson back with us and Brett is he’s served as the president and CEO of the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce in California since January 2019. Brett is a native Californian and resident of San Diego’s North County since 1971. He came to the Carlsbad position from the VISTA Chamber of Commerce where he served as CEO for nine years is corporate background before the chamber was in residential real estate and the software industry. In 1992. He helped start the technical difference Inc, a human resource software company. before venturing into the corporate world. Brett spent seven years as a youth minister, Brett graduated from the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio, earning a BA in psychology and a BA in theology. He earned his master’s in theological studies from the University of Dallas in 2001. He and his wife Jolene reside in Vista, California, and they’ve been blessed with six children and two grandchildren so far. Brett, I’m looking forward to having you with me on the podcast today. And and I want to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better.

Bret Schanzenbach 3:07
Morning, Brandon, thank you so much for having me as a guest today. I’m excited to be here and have conversation. Something interesting. I mean, you read my bio, so that stole most of the stuff that’s actually interesting about me, I guess I would say one thing that’s interesting is, you know, like a lot of people like backed into the chamber career, I don’t know if anybody truly like goes to college and thinks, oh, I want to be a chamber executive when I grow up, you know, so, and the way I backed into my chamber career was through the real estate industry, I did real estate for eight years and found out that I hated it. And, you know, as you mentioned, my wife and I have six kids and you know, real estate, you have to obviously work on your client’s terms. And so they usually are available on nights, weekends, holidays, you know, things like that. And after a while, I just really did not enjoy that industry. And, but that’s the industry that got me super engaged with my local chamber. When I was a realtor, I had joined my chamber, joined a committee got invited to the board of directors and because of all that, you know, it’s how I got really familiar with the impact chambers could have in a in a community. And when the guy who was the executive of my local board there that I was part of, he decided to move back to the Midwest with his wife. You know, I’m like, Oh, this is great opportunity to get out of this because I’m so done with real estate and I didn’t really know exactly what I was getting into but you know, I so but I backed in. I had I remember having a conversation with him one day when we were talking about him leaving and me possibly applying for the job. And I said Um, I don’t actually know what you do on a day to day basis. What do you

Brandon Burton 5:07
board member? Yeah, what you do?

Bret Schanzenbach 5:10
So, but I threw my hat in the ring. And now I’ve been in the industry for 14 and a half years, I think it is or, or I’m in my 14th year, however that works and love it.

Brandon Burton 5:24
As I say, hopefully it’s going better for you than real estate. So yeah, I really do love it. And maybe that needs to be the question I ask people is how did you find your way into the chamber world? Because everybody has a unique story about how they are? Yeah,

Bret Schanzenbach 5:38
that is so true. You know, one of my neighboring chamber execs. He is one of those guys that came right out of college and got a job at his local chamber and moved his way up and all that jazz. But that is so rare. It’s mostly people who have come from all kinds of different. You do find a lot of people who served at a chamber before they became an exec. But the stories are so different.

Brandon Burton 6:02
Right? Yeah, I always find it fascinating. So thank you for sharing your journey. Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about the Carlsbad chamber just to give us an idea of size staff budget, kind of scope of work to give us an idea of what you guys do there.

Bret Schanzenbach 6:20
Sure. So we are located as you mentioned, in North San Diego County. We’re about 3530 35 miles from the city of San Diego itself. And we our community itself, is about 115,000 people in in our suburb here. But for our part of San Diego County, we’re kind of the economic hub. We have a robust tourism industry, but we also have robust industry in general, which is a nice combination, and at least in San Diego County is pretty rare besides the city of San Diego. We are we’re the number two generator and tourism dollars in our county behind the city of San Diego itself. And and I think we have the third largest industrial park in San Diego County. So both we have this great mix of both, you know, like biotech and high tech and that kind of stuff. And then the tourism side. So that’s great. Our chamber itself, we have right around 1000 members, little over 1000 members. San Diego County has 43 chambers of commerce, and we’re the second largest with the city of San Diego, the Regional Chamber in San Diego being the largest. So we’re the second largest chamber in the county, we have about a $1.3 million budget staff of nine. We do not our community has we have separate visitor Bureau, we have a separate Downtown Association. Our city has its own economic development department. So we don’t have any of those other add ons that some chambers do. But we obviously we work very closely with all of those entities matter of fact, we meet regularly have a great rapport with them. But but we don’t fulfill those, you know, those specific roles, like getting funding to be say a visitor center or a manage the downtown or any of those things. So So yeah, that’s a little bit about us. I have a very large board of directors. That was kind of the biggest, one of the biggest changes coming from my previous chamber where we we had what I thought was a big board at the time, like of 17. And, you know, I have 35 voting members and, you know, for other like, advisory members and then other emeritus members, we have a large board here.

Brandon Burton 8:56
Yeah, they work for a lot of people. That definitely helps paint the picture for sure kind of where you guys sit and the type of work I’m involved with.

Bret Schanzenbach 9:06
I do work for a lot of people. It’s very true.

Brandon Burton 9:11
Well, I’m excited to get into our topic for our discussion. Today we’re we’re going to be focusing our discussion around presenting employment opportunities to youth in the classroom. And we’ll dive more into this discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Bret, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about presenting employment opportunities to the classroom today. I know our our scheduling of recording this is being worked around both you and I both volunteering at at church youth camps and so forth. So I know for me, and I may be speaking for you as well, that the rising generation is important to me. And and I think for chambers in general to look at that future employment pipeline and creating a vibrant economy in your community. So I’m excited to have you tell us what the Carlsbad chamber has been doing to introduce these these students, these youth to what a future can look like in your community through the various employment opportunities.

Topic-Presenting Employment Opportunities to the Classroom

Bret Schanzenbach 13:05
Yeah, thank you for that lead in it is a very important topic for all chambers. And I feel like as we go to our conferences, and you know, you attend webinars, and you see this topic comes up more and more and more, because it’s a it’s not just a local issue. It’s a nationwide issue. And if I could, before I explain what we’re currently at, I want to paint a little bit of a picture of what we used to do. That led up to our current initiative and our chamber, like probably many others who are listening in, we’re very engaged at one point or another in trying to bring together the world of work and the classroom, you know, to bring those together as you as you alluded to, and what we had been doing before, we had this program called talent, cities, and we brought eighth graders out on field trips to actual businesses, like different manufacturing type businesses, et cetera, et cetera. And instead of just doing like a tour of the business, we specifically crafted a tour where they would stop strategically at different places at the company that they were visiting, and they would get a little interview with somebody. So a couple of those stops would be like, on a shop floor, for instance. And then a couple of stops would be more like in research and development and marketing and sales, things like that. So there’s always this mix, kind of a, the blue collar, the white collar type things, but we at each stop, they would hear from a staff member and employee who would talk about who they were, what they did, what they liked about it, what was challenging about it, and how they got to this point in their career. And our goal with that bringing those kids out on site was to just broaden their perspective. Have a little bit because what mostly we found is that most students know what their mom and their dad do if they have both parents. And sometimes they don’t even know what their parents do. Because sometimes what their parents do, they just, they just have no way of actually knowing what they do. But beyond that, they just know the big hero jobs like teacher, firefighter, policeman, military, you know, stuff like that. So our goal was to try to broaden their perspectives just a little on what kinds of jobs and career opportunities could be available to them. And when we started that program that we called Talent cities, it was we felt that was successful, like we would actually pull the kids before they would go through with this kind of a tour, field trip, etc. And then we would survey them again, after and we got some great comments, like one that really stuck out in my mind, one of the kids said, you know, I never thought I could use my love of art in, you know, a work setting or a job or a career or whatever. So things like that. That was exactly what we were hoping to do is help them to see a little bit bigger than they had had a chance to up to that point in their life. But we ran into challenges. So that program, when I was at the VISTA chamber, we ran 1,000/8 graders through in like an 18 month period of time. And at least out here in Southern California field trips are challenging for school districts, and all those logistics that they have to go through to make a field trip happen are not simple. And then secondly, I found that I was constantly going back to the same four or five different companies saying, Hey, I got another group of 38th graders or 20, you know, whatever, for you guys to host. And so, you know, it becomes challenging for businesses to interrupt their flow to do that on a regular basis. So all that being said, That was that was the precursor, when COVID hit, obviously, the whole world pivoted towards virtual learning, virtual interaction, et cetera, et cetera. And at the same time, our local hospital out here was working on some initiatives to help their career readiness workforce pipeline get developed. And so they were interested in, in creating some videos to help broaden people’s awareness of career opportunities within healthcare. Most people when they think of healthcare, all they think of as a nurse and a doctor. And obviously, when you have a big hospital, there’s usually something like, I think our hospital has, like 2200 employees. So there’s all kinds of careers, that all the way from marketing, you know, down to techs and an

Brandon Burton 18:00
average janitors, you know, everything Yeah,

Bret Schanzenbach 18:03
you got it, you got it. So there’s, there’s so much diversity within just a company like that. So they approached us and and so what we ended up putting together and one of the things I love about this is, this was a collaboration with three different chambers of commerce here in my area. So we the Carlsbad chamber, our two neighbors directly nearest the Oceanside chamber and the VISTA chamber, the hospital that I just mentioned, and then our regional EDC edge, our Regional Economic Development Council for our area, the five of us together collaborated on this project. And we went out to our local county representative and said, Hey, we have this idea. And so luckily, he bought into the idea that I’m going to share and funded it because this stuff doesn’t happen without some money behind it. But we created a web portal. And it’s called SoCal. And that’s an acronym that I always forget, but it stands for student opportunities for career awareness and learning. SoCal, and the website is called SoCal workforce.org, SoCal workforce.org. And so we created this web portal. And what we did as we were starting to conceive it, and one of the pieces that was really important to us as we wanted to do this in conjunction with our schools, we didn’t, we didn’t want to do this in some silo by ourselves and just do what we thought made sense. So we worked with the three school districts in the three communities that I just mentioned, Carlsbad, Oceanside and VISTA. And we said, hey, here’s this idea we have, we want to make this evergreen portal of jobs and careers, a video library, if you will, that you can use in the cloud. last room to expose students to the real world of work. And they love the idea, we met with them like two or three times during the process of developing it. And, and when we unveiled it in January of this year 2022, they were ecstatic. And so what the web portal has, when you go there, and it’s open to anybody, so it could be like a teacher who’s navigating this or an individual student, or like, anybody who’s in a, looking to change directions in life, right? Anybody can use this, this website, but you can look up job or career opportunities, three different ways, by industry, by company name, or by a job itself. So like industry, you could look and say, oh, what kinds of things exist in my area in healthcare and tech, in, you know, in public safety, or whatever the case might be? Or, Hey, I’ve heard of, in our area that, you know, there’s some big name companies like ViaSat, or Nordson, or, you know, whatever the company is, I’ve heard of that company, what jobs might be, what careers do they even have, I don’t even know what they do. Or you could just go the path of, you know, like, I want to know more about being an engineer or want to know more about being a this or that. So whatever way you navigate, you eventually get down to these three minute videos. And what we did is we shot all the videos on location. At the site where the worker works, we wanted it really, in their workspace in their flow, like all the B roll, we didn’t use any third party just B roll that you can just purchase, you know, anywhere, everything is shot at the actual site where these people work. And we interview these these various workers. And it’s the same kind of interview that I mentioned earlier, who they are, what they do, what do they like about it? What’s challenging about it?

How do they get to this point in their career, if they were adding a staff member to their team, what would they be looking for. And so in these three minute videos, you get a really good snapshot of a real life, you know, place of work, job, career, etc. And, on our portal, another piece that I really like, because we were trying to think of it from the student perspective is, when you get down to the actual job, before you watch the video, there’s a description there, hey, here’s a little bit about the job. Here’s what the average person in San Diego County makes, who, who performs this job, here’s the job outlook for the next five to 10 years for that profession, in our area. And then if, you know, educational resources are like if you need a degree or a certificate or something to do that job, here’s a couple of links of local institutions who offer those certificates or degrees, etc. And so then with all that background, and they can watch the three minute you know, video and and get to know, that particular job, career, etc. And school districts, when we rolled it out in January, we’re over the moon, they love it. Now, it’s not that a school district can’t like if they wanted to bring, oh, let’s let’s look at a day in the life of the engineer. They can they have resources, they can find that that’s out there. But what our school districts really loved about this project was that it’s so localized. So these are companies that they’re, the students may have heard of, these are places that they’ve driven by, I mean, these are right here in their backyard. And it just the teachers were so excited about making it tangible to their students.

Brandon Burton 24:02
So I’m gonna circle back towards some of the beginning of your comments, and you mentioned that students often will only know what their parents have done it Yeah, just funny. When I was in third grade, I drew some attention from the school when I told them that my dad sold drugs because a pharmaceutical sales rep but I would hear him come home talking about the new drug that he’s marketing. So you know, naturally when we talk about what is your dad do for a living my dad sold drugs so that prompted a parent teacher conference and Oh, no that so that was interesting. But so with these, this web portal and video library I love this idea that I love being able to have the different angles being able to filter by industry company and job type. Are you primarily focusing on the bigger companies because they have so many different levels, different types of positions? Or do you have some of the smaller entrepreneurs even that are highlighting what a day in the life of their work is? Like?

Bret Schanzenbach 25:11
Yeah, good question. Um, it is it is intended to be a mix of both. But initially, it was, when we were at the conception phase and trying to get it off the ground, it was a little bit easier to go to some of the bigger companies who have a diversity of roles already, and say, hey, you know, we want to shoot three different, you know, jobs through different roles at your company. But, but we have both some, so we have some large companies, but we also have some, I would say, medium sized companies. And, and when we launched in January, our goal was to get, I think our goal was to have 60 videos on the portal at launch. And we ended up we met that goal. And currently there’s, there’s 80, I’m trying to think through the numbers. Yeah, currently, there’s 80. And our goal by the end of this calendar year is to get to 100. And then obviously, continue to grow it but but yeah, the so we’re trying to diverse, like to your point, we’re trying to diversify as we grow, and get a more industries be more diversity of size of companies and things. The county supervisor who really bought into this initially, he wanted us to have a healthy mix of things that did not require going to get a four year degree. Sure. And as you probably know, there’s, you know, obviously, there’s the big push in the schools for STEM, and, you know, that kind of stuff. So we wanted to have, obviously, that kind of stuff, too. So we worked really hard. So there’s like some, there’s some construction jobs, you know, what I mean, there’s welders and you know, that kind of stuff in the midst of off. So there’s engineers and you know, etc. So we’re worked hard to try to have that kind of diversity in there.

Brandon Burton 27:07
Yeah. And I can see this library just growing over time with expanding the different companies. But there’s always going to be the need for an accountant and a lawyer and a doctor in some of those staples. But then you see new careers popping up to you know, from I’m thinking when the smartphones came out, and you had app developers, and that wasn’t like you had software designers, but now specifically apps and now. So we see technology shifting with, you know, the metaverse and things like that. And, you know, what is the career going to look like 10 years from now, it might look very different. But exposing these students to those opportunities might help them avoid, you know, eight years in the real estate industry if they don’t like that, right.

Bret Schanzenbach 27:53
Yeah, no, you’re but you’re you’re spot on it. I mean, there’s people who have careers right now that five years ago, those things didn’t even exist. So you know, so theoretically, somebody entering college today, you know, might end up in a career a few years from now, that doesn’t even exist as they start college at least. And Title and name like you, like an app developer. At one point, there was no such thing, right? Or what exactly is an influencer again, but making a lot of money at it. I don’t know what that means. You know, so that is a challenge to, but the other thing that we’re doing is one of the challenges we had when, you know, when I was sharing that example, at my previous chamber, where we were working hard to bring the, the classroom world into the real world of work. We were doing it within our given community, you know, I was the VISTA chamber, and these were Vista businesses, and this was the Vista school district and, but at least in our area, and I know, every region could be, you know, have some differences here. But in our area where we are a suburban, you know, area, it doesn’t make sense to do it. siloed but community by community, which is why this regional approach we felt made a lot more sense. Like, I live in community a I work in community b I go to school and community see my churches in community D. I mean, that’s, that’s actually true for me what I just said, you know, so it was really important for us to take a broader perspective, here in Carlsbad. There. 80,000 people come to work every day, but only 20,000 of those actually live in Carlsbad. So that’s a lot of people coming to work from neighboring communities. And so we had that mindset. So now what where we’re at is, since we launched in January, we’ve now added three more communities to our portfolio, San Marcos Escondido Encinitas have all joined us and their school districts as well. So we’re growing it growing the footprint of it geographically. And then as you already were talking about the companies, the jobs, the those kind of operates, the industries are growing as well. And so we eventually see it hopefully being county wide, but that’s going to take a little while, but county wide, and, you know, just continuing to expand the diversity of opportunities to,

Brandon Burton 30:27
I think it goes to show, maybe the definition of community is changing to some degree, you know, between online communities got your physical communities, you’ve got cities that were established before transportation was as robust as it is now, and, and the world just keeps getting smaller and smaller. So as we silo and say, We are the Carlsbad community, you’re really discounting a lot of opportunity from the neighboring areas that, you know, your residents or employers employees are interacting in those cities anyway. So maybe just kind of a reset on what community actually means.

Bret Schanzenbach 31:02
Yeah, I think that’s a good point. You know, we’re, we’re very fluid in this area, and I believe, probably in a lot of areas, and as you pointed out, transportation being, you know, robust, but this, this portal has been, you know, a great collaboration, and I think, in our industry, you know, that’s really important, you know, in the chamber industry to collaborate together, look for me, you know, how can we create win wins, you know, and it, it’s a, it’s been a really great thing for us to collectively work together on and create value for all of our memberships in this in this region. And our, you know, our bigger members who have a tendency to be members of multiple chambers, they love seeing this to, you know, they love seeing our chambers all work together on on big, more enterprise level projects. So, so that’s been a positive, I think our biggest challenge, you know, as we, we initially got that grant, which was super helpful, but, you know, to grow it, there has to be funding so, videography, high quality videography, and editing doesn’t come free. And, and we have done it at a very high level. So we’re at the point where, okay, we’re looking for some more grants and streams of funding. But we’re also going straight to the companies and say, Hey, if you want your company, you know, featured here, we have a path for that. So we’ve created corporate pricing for those that want to be added. It was interesting when we launched some industries that we hadn’t really thought of jumped up and said, Oh, we want to be featured. And so you know, a municipality, their, their water division, they’re like, We need to promote career opportunities in this field. You know, people don’t think about this. And so they jumped on board and sponsored, you know, right away and got some video shot at, at their, whatever water division at their municipality. So there’s, you know, there’s different pockets that we hadn’t really anticipated. And right now I’m working. You know, I mentioned at the outset that we have a strong tourism in Carlsbad. But at the moment, there is no tourism or hospitality listed on our portal at all. So I’m currently in dialogue with them, they they’re really hurting for workforce right now, after the pandemic, it’s been a challenge getting getting staffed back up to the levels, both at restaurants and hotels, and but we just hosted a panel discussion on tourism about two weeks ago, and they were all talking about how they need to, you know, promote careers within tourism. So, so we had a discussion this week about how they could get into our portal. So we’re putting a proposal together for them to to get some video shot at their place. So, you know, I love that, that we have this tool to be able to help serve those who have that need right now.

Brandon Burton 34:05
Yeah, I love that. And thank you for touching on the funding part of it too, because I was going to ask that next about day, how do you make all this happen? And yeah, variety of sources and, and being creative as you go along to and looking for those new opportunities.

Bret Schanzenbach 34:19
Very true. I mean, obviously, there we all in our communities know of some, some go to little, you know, channels where we go after funding for this or that, but eventually, you know, we need business to step up. You know, we were looking regionally at funding sources. You know, our local congressman really liked the idea what so one of the things that’s been that’s come up though, is multiple people have said, hey, it would be great. If your portal could be like a one stop shop for internships, companies who want to host interns, you know, people who want to have an internship and it could be a one stop shop and You know, we’re dealing with all these different jurisdictions now different school districts, and you know, all this stuff. And they all have their own

Brandon Burton 35:08
parameters. And yeah,

Bret Schanzenbach 35:10
exactly. So it’s like, oh, boy, how do we do this? So that’s probably like version three of the portal. Not even version two. But so those are things we’re aspiring to, though and are on our radar to continue to evolve, how this portal can continue to serve the needs of our community now that it’s launched, and it’s getting on people’s radar.

Brandon Burton 35:33
Yeah, I really liked that. But as we start to wrap things up here, I wanted to ask you, for anybody listening? What tip or action item might you share with them to any chamber that’s looking to take their organization up to the next level?

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Bret Schanzenbach 35:51
Yeah, that’s, um, you know, it’s a great question we talked about here. And, and other people have heard in the industry, that we can’t, we can’t be our grandfather’s chamber. You know, the chamber, the days when you think of kind of like, there was a time where businesses join the chamber, and you can pick a variety of reasons, the chamber was the go to place for networking, that was probably the easiest chamber was the go to place for advocacy, you know, you know, things like that. And we don’t have the market cornered on any of those things anymore. I mean, there’s a million ways to network from meet up and you know, online tools to lead clubs and all that kind of stuff. There’s so many ways to network, besides even just social networking. And then advocacy, every industry has its own, you know, vehicle, you know, their own Association, that advocates just for their specific niche needs, and really watches their back. And I still think chambers are excellent at broad scale advocacy, and networking, and all that kind of stuff. But we don’t have the market cornered on any of those things that used to be kind of synonymous with why you need to join a chamber. So we’re constantly asking, asking ourselves, you know, what is our you know, value proposition? What are we bringing to the table that nobody else is bringing to the table, which is part and parcel with this, this discussion we just had today, this is one piece of it for us, you know. So we’re, we’re involved in workforce development in about five or six different fingers or different ways. This SoCal project was just one of them. But that’s, for us, it was like, nobody, when I left broad scape, broad scale, nobody’s involved in this, nobody can bring to the table what we can and workforce development, the relationship with the companies and the relationship with a schools which already we have, you know, we can we can be this bridge that nobody else can serve. So we’ve, that’s one of the stakes we put in the ground, this is going to be a value proposition that we have for our membership. But looking at those things, what do you bring to the table that not nobody else is, you know, Rotary can’t bring to the table or, you know, some nonprofit in your community can’t bring to the table or some Meetup group can’t bring to the table, you know, what, what is it that’s unique. And so we look for those things we and we have, you know, we’re constantly developing new initiatives, which is a little daunting, to be honest, we have to be careful, we don’t get out of a mission and, and go off on some tangent, but, but, and I think, and one other thing I want to, I want to point out 25 years ago, when people thought of economic development, they primarily thought of, let’s try to get Company X or company wide to come to our city. And they’ll bring good jobs, and that’ll be good for the community. And we even saw it like five or six years ago, like the whole country was tripping over themselves to try and get the next you know, Amazon headquarters, you know, and it was almost comical, but and there’s I’m not saying that’s not valid, but even before COVID We knew and now since COVID We really know that people can be from work from anywhere. Yeah, you know, they don’t you it doesn’t matter where their job is. It’s where do they want to be and so we have to create a community that attracts people that want to be there not because their company’s there. So what does that mean? Well, what attracts people you got to have, you know, low crime rate, great schools, affordable housing, amenities and parks and stuff that people want, you know, a good entrepreneurial environment, you know, business friendly, me all these factors together. There are what make places desirable for people to locate. And, and, and be. So we have to be about all of it. You know, we can’t just be siloed in, we’re a business organization, we are going to work with business. That’s long gone. And so we’re constantly looking at how can we make a positive impact in all those areas, so that we can make our community a great place to, you know, live workplace shop, dying vacation visit, you know, all of that. And so it’s it’s exciting, but it’s daunting. It’s a, the the ways you can engage that are never ending, which wakes me up and gets me excited. And also overwhelms me sometimes at two o’clock in the morning. But that’s what I love about the industry.

Brandon Burton 40:51
Now, and I think something you touched on is, it’s the shift of placemaking. Like it used to be, you’re attracting business, and now it’s attracting those employees, attracting those people that want to live in your community. And I think your response, it may answer my next question, but I like asking everybody I have on the show, as we look to the future chambers of commerce, how do you see their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Bret Schanzenbach 41:16
Yeah, I think that the role that we serve as a hub within the community is so vital and important, and valuable, so valuable, you know, we can pull together stakeholders from so many different things from from public safety, and government, to education and nonprofits and business and we can put them in the same room. And, and sometimes you don’t maybe only need two or three of those fingers for what your initiative is, but, but you can, we can pull together things that nobody else can and, and so we have to, we have to embrace that role. And you know, find the issues within our communities that are meaningful, and, and go after them and be the solution. We don’t have to have all the answers, but be the one that convenes everybody to help create the positive movement for the community. And I think if we wholeheartedly embrace that role will continue to be relevant, and will continue to have a reason to exist. But you know, if we just kind of bury our head, and like, we’re the business community, I think that’s too narrow. And I feel like most chambers have evolved beyond that. But, but I see going forward, just we have to take that up, you know, wholeheartedly and run with that mentality to be community leaders, not just business leaders.

Brandon Burton 42:42
Right. And being that that embracing being a convener is is so important, and you guys are setting a great example with the SoCal program. Because that’s exactly what you’re doing is you’re bringing those those right people to the table to help provide opportunities for the the youth coming up that are going to be the future workforce. Yeah. So Brad, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about the SoCal program or how you go through all the things in Carlsbad, what’s the best way for someone to reach out and connect?

Connect with Bret Schanzenbach

Bret Schanzenbach 43:18
Sure. I have the easiest email in the world. So one of my emails is ceo@carlsbad.org. And you can email me the if somebody wanted to check out that website I mentioned socalworkforce.org. And you can see more. I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on all those different. I don’t know social media thing is, you know, I respond I actually check messages on LinkedIn. If anybody messages me on the other ones, I don’t check those but but you can connect with people all the time on LinkedIn, especially chamber pros. I love connecting with other chamber professionals. Because I value them and you know, there’s none of us has all the answers in this world of of what we do in the chamber. So I love learning and meeting other people and hearing what’s working in their communities and seeing if there’s any tidbits I can bring back to my community. So yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn. Email me ceo@carlsbad.org. And yeah, love to connect.

Brandon Burton 44:28
Very good. I’ll make sure if we get all that in our show notes for this episode, which will be found at chamber chat. podcast.com/episode 191. But Brad, this has been great having you on the podcast. I appreciate you taking the time to be with us and sharing this great example of what you guys and you know, in collaboration with your neighboring Chambers as well are doing and it’s a great template that others can look to and build upon themselves.

Bret Schanzenbach 44:55
Well, thank you so much for the invitation, Brandon, I really enjoyed it.

Brandon Burton 44:58
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