Money Matters for Nonprofits with Melisa Galasso

Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Melisa Galasso. 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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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 had a paper route in middle school. He’s my dad, Brandon Burton.

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to chamber tap 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 0:47
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 1:28
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.

You’re joining us for episode number 201. We just got over our 200 Mark, which is a big deal. But before we jump into this episode, I just want to remind everybody of the chamber pros planner giveaway that we’re doing right now with Izzy west. So if you’re interested in getting a free copy of Izzy’s Chamber Pros Planner for 2023 What you need to do is leave a review for Chamber Chat Podcast, in Apple Podcasts or even on our Facebook page. Take a screenshot and email it to me at Brandon@chamberchatpodcast.com and you’ll be entered into a raffle to win one of 5 2023 Chamber Pro Planners.

Our guest for this episode is Melisa Galasso. Melisa is the founder and CEO of Galasso Learning Solutions LLC, a CPA with nearly 20 years of experience in the accounting profession. Melisa designs and facilitates courses in advanced technical accounting, and auditing topics, including not for profit and governmental accounting. Her passion is providing high quality CPE that is meaningful creates effectiveness improves quality and positively impacts ROI. She also supports essential professional development, audit level training and train the trainer efforts. Melisa is a 2020 enterprising Woman of the Year Award recipient and was honored as a 40 under 40 by CPA practice advisor in 2017 2018 and 2019. She was also named the 2019 Rising Star by her region and AWB Oh chapter received the Don farmer award for achievement and technical content, content instruction and earn several other awards for public speaking and technical training. Melisa, I am excited to have you with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love to give you a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions and to share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better.

Melisa Galasso 3:35
Well, thank you so much for having me, it has been an absolute pleasure, super excited to be here. So something interesting about me is that I have always been a pretty avid traveler. And when I started abroad, I managed to make it to every country in Europe outside Portugal. So I really did a very concerted effort studying abroad to also study other places outside of where I was studying, which was in Paris, France.

Brandon Burton 4:01
That’s awesome. Now many people can say that they’ve got that that much travel under their belt and experience in other countries. So very good. I like it. So I mentioned that I’m excited to have the on the on the podcast. I’ve had a few chamber professionals reach out to me, I guess more than a few over the last couple of years. specifically asking for episodes regarding finances at their chamber. Think through the pandemic and just a lot of turnover we’ve seen in the chamber industry. A lot of these individuals often had been serving on their board and then found yourself in the chamber presidency EOC and are trying to get their head wrapped around the finances at the chamber. So I think this episode is really going to provide a lot of value for those newcomers into the space but also some that have been around that maybe just need to take a little internal audit of how they’re keeping track of their finances. So I’m sure we’ll we’ll get into that but tell us a little bit about at your company, what it is that you do kind of your focus and in what you’re all about.

Melisa Galasso 5:05
Alright, well Galasso Learning Solution provides continuing professional education to CPA firms in particular. But we also support governments, nonprofits and other organizations. And we try to provide training that is practical and really engaging after I obviously, am a licensed CPA, but I spent many years in the profession and I went back to learn about instructional design. And so I have my master trainer designation, I have my certified professional and talent development and my certified speaking, professional license. And so really trying to make learning more fun, because CPAs are required to get on average, about 40 hours a year of CPE, which is more than most doctors and lawyers are required to have. So it’s a profession filled with the goal of learning. And there’s always change going on. And so I really want to make my courses as practical, engaging, and really relevant. And so we use needs assessments and things of that nature to help people really figure out what are their goals for the learning, and then how can we achieve that in the most fun way possible?

Brandon Burton 6:04
Absolutely. Yeah. I imagine with the ever changing tax codes and things like that there’s a need for that continuing education, but it also keeps you gainfully employed.

Melisa Galasso 6:15
Some days, we say that this is like the Full Employment Act for our trainers.

Brandon Burton 6:20
That’s right. That’s right. So for this episode, Melisa, she’s also the author of the book money matters for nonprofits, which I didn’t mention is I read through her bio, but for this episode, we will focus a lot on why she wrote the book, what the book covers kind of the purpose of it, and we will dive into that discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Izzy West 7:57
Hey, this is Izzy, publisher of the Chamber Pros Planner, a weekly monthly planner featuring weekly meeting notes, habit tracking and 12 week goals. Last year, Emily Roberts of the Madison Area Chamber commented on the Chamber Pros Facebook group. “This is my first time getting this planner and it’s great. It’s specific for chamber professional and it has lots of notes room checkout Izzy West’s website to get a better picture of it.”

So you’d heard her go to TheIzzyWest.com to learn more about the Chamber Pros Planner. I have a video you can watch of me slowly flipping through the book so you can decide if it’s right for you.

Brandon Burton 8:30

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Melisa Galasso 9:45
Well, I would always tell you I’m not I don’t feel like a writer. And so it’s very interesting always now to be referred to author because it is 300 pages of length there but what really was the impetus to have this for years and years similar to you got questions like How do I get my board to engage, but predominantly, my client base is filled with CPA firms. And so they’ll go out and do an audit, they’ll do a review for a nonprofit for our chamber. And then when it comes time to present the financials, they’ll hear things like crickets. No one wants to ask any questions, nobody, you know, they’re like, can we just approve this real quick and make them go away? And obviously, my clients really want to engage, they want to help, they want to answer questions, they, you know, the people that I work with are phenomenal CPAs, they really do care about their client base. And they wanted them to have a basic understanding. And so people would call and say, Hey, do you have a book that you would recommend for board members? Or do you have a book you would recommend about the basics of nonprofit accounting. And what I always struggled with is there are amazing books out there on governance, right? If you want to read about nonprofit governance, there are great phenomenal books out there. But there’s only usually one chapter on accounting. And then when you got an account, when you found a nonprofit accounting book, it was like in the weeds, debits and credits, like bookkeeping, and most board members don’t need that, they just need to be able to understand what should be on the financial limits, they need to be able to interpret the financial statements, and they need to be able to evaluate to the into the financials, they don’t need to actually do the bookkeeping. And so as a result, I always had trouble really making a reference. And then I guess the silver lining of COVID is pre COVID. I spent I you know, three to four days each week on the road training. And so I didn’t really have any free time. And then all of a sudden, my evenings and to afternoon started becoming more and more open mornings and everything opportunity. Who knew that there could be something positive come out of being grounded for almost 18 months. And so I decided to write the book and the publisher was interested, again, also getting lots of feedback that there wasn’t that book out there. And so we wrote the book.

Brandon Burton 11:51
All right. So what would you think the idea being that this podcast is for Chambers of Commerce? I mean, most of the listeners are chamber professionals of some sort, whether they’re the president CEO, or the director of sales or marketing or vice president? Who would you say the ideal target is for this book? Is it going to be the board member? Or is it going to be the chamber President, to kind of have both sides of what’s being presented? What, what would be your thought?

Melisa Galasso 12:20
I actually have learned that while the book was really written with board members in mind, and a lot about what the board responsibilities are fiduciary activities, and fiduciary responsibilities, etc, what I have learned is that a lot of people who are in the space actually are interested in learning. So I’ve had multiple CEOs say, You know what, I actually could use this like I know for, I’ve also kind of leverage either my finance person or the treasurer on the board. And I haven’t necessarily always understood some of the terminologies or when something was changed. And so anyone who really wants to understand the inner workings, I would be an ideal reader. It’s not written super detailed. And you know, I’ve actually had very recently got an email from someone who said, they actually give it to their accountants who are stiff people who haven’t necessarily been exposed to nonprofit accounting before, because when you come out of school, even as an accountant, you learn commercial GAAP, you learn how to do commercial accounting, and we don’t have an owner’s equity in a nonprofit, we don’t have a lot of that we do have some special things like contributions and other things that are kind of harder. And so this really gives people an opportunity, who just want to have a better understanding of these types of accounts, what it is that they could be learning. And my favorite part, honestly, of the book is all the examples, we reached out to so many amazing nonprofit to have beautiful financial statements to give examples, because you can always make XYZ nonprofit, right? But let’s look at some real entities and really look at the differences that are out there in presentation and how you can do this, and really make it more interesting. And so I think that a lot of people benefit just from the opportunity to look at things maybe differently than how you’re doing and say, Oh, I like that, or I like that. Let’s, you know, let’s see what we want to do.

Brandon Burton 14:03
I love that. And that’s a lot of what we do on the podcast here is presenting different ideas of how one chamber does something and you can call it rip off and duplicate and do it your own chamber. So I like to use real examples of other nonprofits. So those that read can rip off and duplicate what what makes sense to apply that you’ve alluded a couple of times now between not having a section on debits and credits and not having owner contribution contributions or disbursements. What type of differences are there between a nonprofit set of financials versus that of a corporate business or personal finance?

Melisa Galasso 14:39
Absolutely. So the balance sheet looks a little bit different because we still have assets and liabilities and that’s pretty consistent between all entities. But the leftover in a corporate environment would be owner’s equity, and so you worry about things like dividends and retained earnings, but nobody owns a nonprofit. So we use net assets. And so net asset classification is really simple. Orton to nonprofits and so what some things are restricted and can only be used for certain reasons, right, you can’t walk into Target and say, Here’s my $50, if you’re lucky, and here’s how I want you to spend it, right. That’s not really how it works. And so restrictions are very unique. And so we talk a little bit about why we present them differently on the face. And so you always have typically multiple columns we looking at or multiple rows around those net assets, we also use something called a statement of activities, which could also have a bunch of different terms. So that’s like your income statement. But because we’re not looking to make a profit, we’re not looking for that calculation. So we’re looking at the change in net assets. And so we’re still have revenue and expenses, we still have gains and losses, those things are the same. But how we present them is different. And so it’s a really pretty presentation. And one of the things about the statement of activities is it could look pretty much like anything, you can have a single column, you can have multiple columns, you have comparative years, you can have summarized years, you can do pretty much anything you want with it. And so I think that’s what makes it so interesting is you can kind of find what’s the right way to tell your story. And that’s what a financial statement supposed to do is tell your story to your user. And so what presentation you use really depends on the organization and your users. And then I think the other big thing here is that there’s lots of guidance around Kunshan, accounting, and other types of things that are sort of unique to nonprofits that you will see. And so we take one chapter just to go over the basic financial statements, what they are a little bit about each of them. And then there’s a chapter for each one going over what are some of the key elements that you should be seeing there were are there unique elements for each, for each standard, and for each presentation? And then at the end, we actually have an analysis. So okay, if you have all of these right, you have a statement of functional expenses, which again, makes a nonprofit environment, like what do I do with this? There’s all these numbers, right? There’s all these words, right? And sometimes it’s overwhelming. Yes, I know what an asset is, and know what a liability is, but like, what should they be? Or what ratio should they be at? And so we have an entire chapter on how to evaluate and what to do with that information. So what are some ratios you can calculate? What are some trends you can look at? What are some KPIs that you can use to evaluate organization? And this way, you can look forward? What do you want to do? What do you want to achieve? Okay, how do I benchmark how do I get there, and to make it a little bit more practical, because again, just versus overwhelming to a lot of people that like, I’m not a numbers person, and like, you don’t have to be a numbers person, you this is adding, subtracting, you may get some division in there. But this is not AP Calculus, right? To the imagination, I tried to make it really very practical on what we could do to to really engage. And then would you talk a little bit about the role of the CPA and what kind of services that they could provide? Because everyone always says, well, I need an audit. And I’m like, nine times out of 10, you probably need an audit, you might need a review or a compilation. Or you might need an audit, but you might need a single audit or Yellowbook audit. So what are all these terms? Because again, it’s like alphabet soup.

Brandon Burton 18:03
Right? So it I think you’re right numbers can be very intimidating. People have that limiting belief. I’m not a numbers person. So when you look at a board, what is the financial and accounting responsibilities for board? And how much do they really need to know to be effective as they operate as a board member?

Melisa Galasso 18:26
So that’s a great question. Because a lot of times people think they’re signing up just to move the mission forward, which is absolutely true. You know, a lot of the boards that I sign on, people are super passionate about it, right? When you think about a chamber, right, you are really trying to in that area, make a difference for those organizations, and you’re trying to make sure those members are well represented as you go through it. And so you’re really passionate about that. So maybe you sign up for the board, because you have this idea of something we can do in the future, or you have this desire to make a difference from a development and fundraising type of experience. And you’ve all these different opportunities. And then someone says, oh, and by the way, we have a finance committee, and they’re everyone, they go good, I’m not going to be on that I have no responsibilities, right? That’s not my thing. I’m not going to do that. But when you sign up to be a board member, you have legal responsibilities for the duty of care, the duty of loyalty and the duty of obedience as part of being on a board. And so automatically, each state sets the rules. There’s a model role that’s across the country, and then each state kind of takes it and adjusts it for the state. But when you’re doing this, you’re talking about going to meetings, right duty of care is showing up and participating. Not just voting yes, even if you don’t understand what’s going on. But really looking at it. Updating policies is another big thing because when we think about this policies are what helps first off those who work in management achieve their objectives, right, they have to be told exactly what the rules and regulations are there. And then we have things like the duty of loyalty which are conflict of interest, very important in the nonprofit world to ensure that We are really putting the the board first as we go through this and requiring everyone to disclose any potential conflicts of interest. And then the big one, which is the duty of obedience, which is making sure that you are doing all the things that are required, whether that’s filing a 990, whether that’s filing financial statements, whether that’s getting the required audit, but making sure that we’re fulfilling these responsibilities. And so everyone who serves on the board has this responsibility, not just the CEO, not just the chair, not just the person who’s in charge of finance, or the treasurer, right. We always like that. That’s the treasurer’s job. But everyone has responsibility for going through and really understanding the finances now, do they have to be a financial expert? Absolutely not. But you are responsible for ensuring adequate financial resources, because if you don’t have the resources, you’ll never achieve your mission. And so you have to really make sure that you’ve got the right finances out there.

Brandon Burton 20:58
Right. And I think to the, to the point of maybe feeling a little bit overwhelming, I see a lot of chamber boards will say, well, let’s get a CPA, that’s a chamber member on the board, and they’ll handle the finance. Right.

Melisa Galasso 21:09
That’s your job.

Brandon Burton 21:10
That’s right. That’s right. So then you just kind of bury your head in the sand. I say they the board members, but what are maybe some important questions that board members should be asking whether it’s to accountants or, or to that CPA that’s on the board that is handling the finances, just to make sure that things are going right.

Melisa Galasso 21:28
Absolutely. So obviously, when you’re looking first off at you know, picking it, there are lots of questions you should ask around, does the CPA firm have experience with chambers, right? So, you know, you may be a nonprofit specialist, but you might not have any experience with the expectations of a chamber. And so a lot of times, one of the things you can do is to start off by picking the right CPA firm, for whatever type of service you’re going to be providing, making sure that they are providing the right level of services, seeing what kind of educational opportunities that they have for really making sure that their right fit that they have the right, you know, requirements that they have a strong quality background, and just kind of getting into that. So those are sort of the starting points. But then they should be asking, especially their CPA, what are the risks that they see for the organization, right, so many CPA firms will tell you about what some of the, you know, what they’re seeing out there, what potentially from internal controls, they might be lacking, that they could consider what they see other chambers doing. So again, I love the idea of just kind of borrowing and using whether you know, best practices,

Brandon Burton 22:36
they’re proud to say rip off and duplicate. So

Melisa Galasso 22:42
clearly recreating the wheel here, like we saw this work really well. And when it’s another organization, similar size, similar type of, a lot of times you get a lot of really good benefit from that. So benchmarking coming from the CPA firm can be really helpful. You can also ask questions like, Are we properly staffed? Do we deserve, you know, just enhanced department, which could be a department of exactly one person? You know, do they have what it takes to get this done? They can also talk about trends that they’re seeing and sort of expectations for the future. Because again, as long as they have that right experience, and working with other chambers, and they’re seeing what’s going on in the industry, they can be really helpful at saying, Okay, well, this is what we’re seeing out there, you know, this might not be impacting you yet. But this is something that you want to see, you know, could be on the horizon for you. And then a lot of times they can get into, you know, sort of the governance type of items as well. So they can talk about internal controls, they can talk about timekeeping systems, they can talk about different types of transactions where they had concerns, but you have to ask, sometimes there’s required communication. So those are typically in a letter that if you don’t read it, you’re not getting a lot of benefit out of, but the conversation with the CPA is super important to have that two way conversation. And, you know, CPA firms come to present they present the financials, and they’re kind of waiting for you to ask questions like, oh, you know, how are we doing? Or how do we compare? And then they’re like, Okay, let’s vote to approve this. So these people don’t, you know, make us feel uncomfortable about their knowledge of finance versus our knowledge of finance. But I’ve never met a CPA who didn’t want to answer questions or provide guidance, because really, you know, they’re in it for the benefit. And people who work with chambers and other nonprofits really want them to be successful. And learning from all of that experience that they have can be super important.

Brandon Burton 24:29
So I feel like the media has done a great job at really highlighting negative aspects of nonprofits, especially when these you know, really greasy stories come out about different fraud and different things. And so then when you hear the term and nonprofit, for me, sometimes I think, okay, what is the true what’s the governance, what’s the purpose? What does this nonprofit do? It makes me scrutinized a lot more before donating money to a nonprofit. But how big of a Problem is fraud in nonprofits and what kind of board do to help hedge that?

Melisa Galasso 25:06
I mean, especially when a nonprofit is smaller and doesn’t have as many people, you have less segregation of duties and segregation of duties is one of the most important internal controls, because it makes sure that one person doesn’t control everything from start to finish. And when we see these nonprofits who try to be great about using funding for its purpose, right, and its mission, it tends to try to scale back on those more overhead type items. And so they try to do more with less, and then all of a sudden, one person is receiving the checks and depositing the checks and reconciling the bank account. And then all of a sudden, right? You know, that you look at this, and they have absolute control. And if you you know, you just search the word nonprofit fraud, it’s pretty sad out there. And there’s a great book on, on what we call pink collar fraud, which is very interesting has a high impact on nonprofits, because it’s tend to typically, right, somebody who you would never suspect, right, you’re like, oh, no, the person at church who reconciles would never steal from the church they love the church was the same thing with chambers, that person would never do anything wrong, because they have this trust. And so trust with that internal controls is a really bad setup, we tend to see a lot of this because the person typically doesn’t go into it for the intent of committing fraud, but then the opportunity kind of overwhelms them. And then the next thing, you know, they’re so knee deep. And we see a lot of stories where they’re like, Oh, I’m just borrowing the money, right? Now I need it, I’m gonna pay it back. And then it just never gets paid back. And it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And so focusing on internal controls is so important, even the smallest organization, because that’s really what the board can help with. The board can be that oversight, they can be the checks and balances, they can review the balance sheet racks, they can review invoices, they can review executive expenses, if there’s no one else who can do that. And so it’s a great opportunity for the board, once they realize where there’s potential for fraud to step up to the plate and say, Okay, I’m going to help with that. And even large organizations to still be very active in that governance. And in those internal controls, even if you have a well staffed organization, that’s really thriving, there’s still opportunities there. And so to know what’s kind of going on, and even some of the, you know, the funding that we saw come out of the federal government over the last few years from COVID, we’ve seen a lot of fraud, because it was just seemed like the money was just available and could be used for anything. And it really wasn’t supposed to be used for just anything. And so we’re starting to see more and more stories about nonprofits who maybe didn’t use the funding the right way, or really wasn’t eligible for it. But there weren’t good checks and balances by the federal government to prevent that money from getting out there. And so again, checks and balances are huge portion of really being that sorting on that board.

Brandon Burton 27:57
Right. And I think, you know, oftentimes the person who commits the fraud, who’s the guilty one ends up being the, you know, the bad guy. And really, it’s just, it’s not a fair situation to put them in where it’s all the trust, and no checks or balances, and it puts them in a really tough situation. And a lot of times, you may be dealing with a lot more money than a person will see in a lifetime, you know, at a really effective nonprofit. And it’s just it’s not fair to put that much burden on one person.

Melisa Galasso 28:26
And it’s unfair, just because it’s an expectation that is unrealistic to, for that person to have. And so they almost feel like, well, you know, they’re asking me to do so much. And therefore, you know, the entitlement kind of kicks in the rationalization kicks in. So I think it’s something that we always have to be careful of is that we all have responsibility for maintaining good internal controls, we all have responsibility for understanding the financial statements, looking at trends of cash is going the opposite way of what we expect asking questions like, Why isn’t cash flowing the way we expect? We had these great fundraisers, or we did this great event or our membership is growing? Like where’s the issue here? So we can kind of take a closer look at it, instead of saying, Well, I’m just not good with numbers. So it must be right.

Brandon Burton 29:09
Yeah. And you talked about having those KPIs. So as you have board meetings, you should be reviewing those KPIs and see where the direction the trajectory of your organization should be going. What are some of the maybe unexpected benefits that can come to an organization by their member by their board members understanding basic accounting and, and maybe unforeseen problems that come if they don’t understand basic accounting?

Melisa Galasso 29:34
I think one of the big benefits of understanding the basics is that when they’re looking at a number, you know, they can say something like, that just doesn’t make sense. Right? So that’s how we teach auditors to audit. We say use a little bit of intuition here. And so if you have an understanding how things flow from one statement to another, again, not all the debits and credits, but you understand how things should flow, then you should be able to say what just doesn’t make sense to me. Can you explain that? Or can you give me a little more of the detail? Or can you, you know, dive in and explain this. And so having just the basics having an understanding of okay, this should happen. And then this should happen. Okay? We know, we expect that as a result of this, we had really good strong revenue, we should expect that the balance sheet should see an increase in net assets, but we don’t. So what’s going on here? And so we can ask the questions. And so no one’s expecting you to know the outcome. I tell that to audit firms all the time. So when I teach CPAs, I’m like, I don’t You don’t need to know what’s wrong. You just need to know that something’s wrong. And then you need to ask questions, you need to do your due diligence, you need to follow up. And you need to use what we call professional skepticism, which is that sort of inquiring mind that, you know, not just taking everything at face value, but really saying Does this make sense? And if you don’t have a basis to start from, right, you just kind of numbers are out there, they don’t have any meaning. They don’t have any relevance, right? They’re just numbers, then you can’t have an expectation, right? So the number 100 is not a good number. It’s not a bad number. Without context, that means nothing. And so by having that basic accounting, you have the context. And not to do that. But to say, Well, I just don’t understand that, or, you know, we have you know, this is I expected to see this as exchange revenue, because based on my understanding, and I don’t see it reported here, like, why is this going in a different place? Oh, it’s being parked on the balance sheet. Because we haven’t earned it yet. Okay, we can work with that. But if we don’t have anything to start with, it’s just numbers, right? And numbers is just like data without information, you have a lot of it. But it doesn’t mean anything. And so board members can really take it up a notch, because they’re really the first line of defense for the organization. And you know, that we tell a couple of stories about when the board chose not to really be involved when the board didn’t rein in executive compensation when the board didn’t say, hey, that’s, you know, unwieldy spending, we look at the eventually it made it to the public, it was announced in a news story, and all of a sudden, the inflow of donations drops. And even all things that this organization has done, they’ve never returned back to where they were pre announcement of this, because it’s hard to build back trust, right. And so people who don’t trust the organization aren’t going to be members, the organization, they’re not going to, you know, participate in it. And so you’re not going to have the funding that you need. And so the way that we develop trust is by having that active board and having the CPA involved to do some due diligence, whether it’s a review, or whether it’s an audit, depending on what would be appropriate for the size of the organization. That’s how you get the trust that people say, okay, yeah, I’m gonna give my money to this organization, because now I believe that they’re going to use it for what it’s supposed to be used for. And we’re going to do what we’re supposed to do with us.

Brandon Burton 32:51
Right? I love that. So I’d like asking everyone I have on the show what might be besides picking up your book, what might be a good tip or action item for Chamber Champions listening? Who would like to take their chamber up to the next level? What What might you suggest?

Melisa Galasso 33:09
I always say that one of the best things you can do is ask questions. And so asking questions is not a sign of not being aware, right? So people like why don’t ask questions. I don’t want to look stupid. But I feel as the people who don’t ask questions who actually are at a disadvantage? So if you’re not sure, ask, and if you want to learn more, ask because so many people would want to share that information with you. So I’m always have the asking questions is a good thing. It shows that you are inquisitive, it shows that you care. And so if you’re not sure, ask and if you want to learn more ask because there are so many things that you can do. And such a positive impact you can make simply by asking questions.

Brandon Burton 33:50
Right now, it definitely shows a level of engagement as you ask and desire to learn more. Thank you. So I also like asking, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Melisa Galasso 34:06
I think especially as a small business owner, myself, I think that the especially as we look at the economy and a lot of what’s going on there right now, I think they’re gonna have an even larger influence. Because you know, as a member of NABO, as you mentioned earlier, we talked a lot about the importance of the chamber locally and the work that they do to support us. And so I think that we’re going to see a growth in this area as there’s been a surge of small businesses coming out of the pandemic, a lot of people not going back to their previous corporate roles, I think there’s going to be an opportunity for additional education for you know, the camaraderie that comes from it. I think a lot of people, especially when you’re doing this for the first time, I know when I started out on my own, it felt pretty lonely, right. And so going out there and finding my Navajo sisters and finding other people who had done that really gave me that opportunity to say okay, yeah, there is, you know, camaraderie there is socialization out there, I’m not all by myself. People have done this before. And they’re great to ask questions of and lessons learned and that willingness to share. And I think that that’s going to be a big boom in the future. As we see all of these, you know, post pandemic organizations, particularly small businesses, who want to be successful going forward, are going to lean on the chamber, as we see changes in shifts in the economy, as we see changes in how, you know, federal funding is being provided. I think the chamber is everyone’s first line. Okay, teach me was it to help me understand network and and show me some people who have been successful here?

Brandon Burton 35:39
Yeah, I appreciate that. Is there anything that we’ve missed in our discussion today, I know there’s a lot in the book, and you can dive in deep, but any anything else you want to make sure that listeners know about or hear about before we wrap up?

Melisa Galasso 35:54
I just think the biggest thing that I would say is really have goals for your organizations and benchmark them somehow KPIs, etc. Because you don’t know it’s sort of like your map forward. How do you know if you’re being successful only if you are measuring it. So there’s so many, like, measure what matters types of, you know, books out there, but it’s really true. If you don’t know what you want to achieve, you don’t know if you’re going to achieve your mission. And so if you set the things leading and lagging indicators that can help you say, okay, am I heading in the right direction? And is it working, you’ll be so much more successful, and not all of them have to be finance related. But having the right financial ones can be indicative of having a really nice set of resources to better serve members.

Brandon Burton 36:39
Great, I love that answer. I’m glad I asked the question of goals, and have those indicators to keep track of your goals. As we wrap up here, Melisa, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who would like to reach out and connect with you, like pick up your book work with you what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect?

Melisa Galasso 37:00
Sure, first off, I’m very active on LinkedIn. So you can find me on LinkedIn. It’s Melisa last and Melisa with one s, if you want to learn more about the books, they have very exciting money matters. MoneyMattersfornonprofits.com is the website that you can go to to learn more about the book and, you know, get a little bit more about what the deep dive is how we are trying to help others. And so those would be the two ways I always I’m super active on LinkedIn, we try to keep people up to date on what’s changing in the accounting world and in the audit world and really help people be successful. So we share a lot of free information there. And so I’d love to connect with all of you.

Brandon Burton 37:37
Yeah, everybody can go follow Melisa on LinkedIn, there’s a lot of good value there whether for yourself or to point your board to so they can be actively engaged in your organization’s finances. That is a great resource. But Melisa, I want to thank you for spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast and you provided a lot of value. I’m excited for chambers to dive in and read your book and to connect with you and learn more and to be more fiscally responsible at their chambers and to set those goals and see their organizations move in a positive direction. So thank you for sharing your your knowledge with us today.

Melisa Galasso 38:14
Thank you so much for having me it was an absolute pleasure.

Brandon Burton 38:17
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