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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
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Brandon Burton 1:45
Our guest for this episode is Bob Rohrlack. Bob serves as the President and CEO of the Tampa Bay Chamber of Commerce. The Tampa Bay chamber is the Florida Association of Chamber of Commerce Professionals 2020 chamber of the year for the large chamber category. Bob earned his doctorate in business administration degree from the University of South Florida. His dissertation research research the factors that influence Chamber of Commerce effectiveness. His award winning research has been published in scholarly peer reviewed journals with over 30 years experience in the Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development profession. He’s led programs at the local, regional and state level. He is a certified chamber executive and past chairman of the Florida Association of chamber professionals, where he was also named the 2017 Florida Association of chamber professionals Executive of the Year since joining the Tampa Bay Chamber. They became the first chamber nationwide to be invited to the White House for an economic briefing discussing issues important to the region. The Tampa Bay Chamber has been awarded the three star chamber of Valor award from the US Chamber of Commerce for their work with the military community. Bob was appointed by Speaker The Florida House of Representatives Dean Cannon to the government Efficiency Task Force, their goal is to recommend $3 billion in savings over four years. He chairs the Subcommittee on Health and Human Services. He’s an honorary commander at MacDill Air Force Base, a board member of visit Tampa Bay, Tampa Downtown Partnership, the Association of Chamber of Commerce executives and the West Shore Alliance. He is past board member of the Florida Chamber of Commerce. Dr. Rohrlack graduated from the Economic Development Institute and the University of Oklahoma and the US chambers IOM program at the University of Georgia, where he also teaches several classes in their program. He’s also an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida. But Bob, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
Bob Rohrlack 4:20
Sure. Thank you, Brandon. I appreciate you hosting me and it’s good to be here to talk about the industry that I’ve been in my entire career. It’s a lot of fun and a lot of great things going on. The Tampa Bay Chamber has right about 1400 members. We’re staff at 22 and we’re focused on our 10 year vision plan. Vision 2026 That is our guideposts for everything we do with the organization and keeps our board focus keeps the team focused on priorities with programs. One of the cool things I got to do with the Chamber for our military initiation event last year, we had it at the Florida aquarium here in Tampa. And part of the event to get to civilians mixing with the military folks, well was a scavenger hunt. And I don’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing. But the chamber team had the idea of me being in the tank with the sharks as part of this scavenger hunt to find me, but I had to get scuba diving certified to be able to do that. So now I’m a certified scuba diver, which is great to open up a whole new hobby, an adventure, but just one of those other duties as assigned, I think in the chamber industry.
Brandon Burton 5:33
That’s awesome. And it’s a great excuse to scuba service. My wife and I, we, you know, we love going on cruises, because we’re scuba certified. So we get to go on a cruise and have three or four different ports where we could dive and sea creatures, and it’s just a fantastic opportunity. So hopefully you’re taking full advantage and being there. Absolutely. Yes. A lot of fun water. Yeah, yep. Yep. So you know, you touched a little bit on the Tampa Bay chamber as far as the membership size staff working on your tenure mission plan. Didn’t tell us a little bit more of the scope of work you guys are involved with? Are you standard chamber to tourism? What what are what type of work are you involved with,
Bob Rohrlack 6:17
you know, the Tampa Bay Chamber, originally the Tampa Board of Trade, Tampa Chamber, Greater Tampa Chamber now Tampa Bay, because our influence has really become much more regional, and what we do both from our membership perspective, the issues we work on, and our team is located throughout the region. So we really focus regionally on what we do.
But with the 10 year vision plan, our mission is to serve our members and enhance our community by building business success. And we do that with our vision plan that has a foundation of organizational excellence, that our members can have confidence that we are running the chamber to the best business practices we can we just presented to our executive committee, our 14th year in a row, clean audit, showing them that we are managing things well, and being responsible with their investment. But that on that foundation stand our three pillars, one that we are the hub for business where businesses come to learn best practices, and skills from each other and build their network. To that we are catalysts for change in our community, that we are advocating for the important issues to make this great region even better. Transportation being our number one priority on improving the choices for transportation throughout the Tampa Bay region. And our center pillar is that we’re an inclusive organization. And this has been our plan since 2017. So we kind of joke that we were inclusive before being inclusive was cool. And our goal is that our membership reflects the demographics of Hillsborough County, which is the most diverse county in the Tampa Bay region. So we’re measuring through ethnicity, male female ownership of business, veteran ownership of business, the industry type industry size. So when we go to talk to our elected officials, and we say we represent the business community, we can say we truly do represent. So that’s been our goal. We’ve been making great progress towards some of those diversity measurements. on the industry side, we’re matching right on to Hillsborough County, which is great. So it’s how do we keep growing that and making the organization stronger because of the diversity inclusivity in our organization? Absolutely. Know that, that helps a lot to just, you know, let us know the type of work that you guys are involved with. And I love that you were able to state your mission statement without looking down and reading it. You know it it’s part of your being.
Exactly.
Brandon Burton 8:51
So as we transition over to our topic for discussion today. Just for those listening, I’ve had several people say you need to have Bob on the podcast. Yeah, he did. His whole Dr. program, about Chambers of Commerce wrote is his dissertation about the effectiveness of chambers of commerce and he just would really have an a neat perspective that we can all learn from so taking everyone’s advice here we are today. We’ve got Bob on the show, and we will dive in much deeper into the chamber industry research that he did, as he went about, you know, writing his dissertation and going to read a soccer program since we get back from this quick break.
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Brandon Burton 12:11
All right, Bob, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re going to be covering more of the chamber industry research that you uncovered and maybe some of those eye opening indicators or facts that maybe stood out to you. But for those listening, maybe just give us a little bit bit of background, what made you decide to go down this avenue as he went about your Doctorate in Business Administration?
Bob Rohrlack 12:40
Yeah, that’s a great question. As I mentioned, our vision plan, vision 2026. I looked at it and I knew I was the guy to put that first plan together and help help the volunteers working with staff and membership the week got that plan started. And as chamber Folks are always you know, we’re never thinking about the day we’re in, we’re thinking about the next month next year and down the cycle of okay, I want to be in the best position to lead the organization on the second 10 Year Vision Plan as we transition to that, which now is four years away. So it’s okay, I need to be investing in my education. So I talked to leadership at the chamber at the time said I really want to work on this program, the director of the dean of the business school at University of South Florida was a board member. So obviously, he was very encouraging. But I really want to focus on researching on how to make this organization even better than we believe we are. And I got the support from our board to do that. So that’s when I started diving in. When you take the classes in a doctoral program, every class is teaching you. Here’s how to do this part of research when you start to work on the dissertation, whether it’s statistics, which everybody groans, taking those classes, or how to do a proper literature review, how to do an interview properly, all those things you need the skills you need to know. And in one of the classes, I was having a tremendous and I knew everything I needed to do focus on chambers of commerce, because eventually I was going to pick some type of topic related to chambers, and you have your your dissertation is a question that cannot be a yes or no question. So I was really struggling trying to find scholarly peer reviewed literature on Chambers of Commerce. So during a break I spoke to the professor said I’m really struggling here and can’t find things. And without missing a beat. He said, Well, you can’t find anything because chambers aren’t worthy of doing research on Oh, and that was my reaction. I was like, Wait a minute. And the light went off and I realize I’m not a 19 year old student anymore. I don’t have to take the professor. So well you know This profession has put food on my family’s table for 30 years, it’s put a roof over our head. For 30 years, I’m going to be doing research on chambers of commerce. And I walked away, and I was not happy. And I thought, I’m now motivated, this is what we’re going to work on. So I kept digging, realize there is not much scholarly research on chambers of commerce in the United States. There are on some chambers in Europe, but they have different business models on how they’re running chambers. So really had to focus on that. So I took the universe, of chambers of commerce of associations to get to the Galaxy, of chambers of commerce, then to the planet chambers of commerce in the United States. And my research question was, how are Chambers of Commerce leaders align for greater effectiveness? And that became just the research I just kept narrowing down on, I interviewed chambers of commerce, CEOs, and the Chamber of Commerce, volunteer leader for the same chamber, all different sized chambers throughout the United States, asking them, how did they define effectiveness for their organization? Shockingly, everyone got stuck on that question 100%. They didn’t know how to define it. Some would say their budget, some would say members. And I said that’s not effective. That’s not measuring effectiveness that’s measuring your marketability on what you’re doing. So just keep digging into that effectiveness. issue. And it was really interesting. Going through it. As I went through those interviews, identified 72 different characteristics. loaded all the interviews into tremendous software application that helped me filter through the topics, I was able to combine that down to 32. The top five were significantly greater than the remaining topics. So I wrote my dissertation on those top five issues, and what they were
Brandon Burton 17:13
so everybody listening, but tell us what are those five effective.
Bob Rohrlack 17:21
In order of being identified, it was leadership, advocacy, convening, competition, and self promotion. Now on leadership, the CEOs thought their volunteer leader was most important to their effectiveness, the volunteer leader thought the staff leader was the most important to their effectiveness, which is a good issue on supporting each other and realizing the importance of working together as a team. And that would be my best advice to any leader of a Chamber of Commerce. If you’re not working in a team relationship with your chair, you need to focus on that. And if you read the line of succession doesn’t show people that are going to be working with you as as a team member, bringing their skill set to match with your skill set. You need to look at how you’re aligning your leadership. So leadership, very important. Advocacy being the voice for business. When I arrived at the Chamber back in 2009, which this is my third time working at the Tampa Bay chamber. But when I came back as CEO, the decision had been made to spin off the Economic Development Department, which we have a history of spinning off organizations to go be successful tourism, regional development, the economic development, the Downtown Development Group, all were born within our chamber and spun out to be standalone strong organizations. But the view was spin out economic development that contracted public sector dollars with the city and the county would go with them. We now are fully funded privately. And it allowed us to grow our advocacy voice to become much stronger, not in a bully way. But in a hey, what we say matters. We need to be working together that wound up developing relationship with our elected officials that they’re coming to us saying, are you all going to take a position on this? Can we present to your policy and advocacy committees on this issue we’d like to work with you on furthering this topic. So it’s created a better partnership. So advocacy is very important. The convening, bringing our members together, we all learned the value of our chambers during the COVID time when we couldn’t come together. We immediately became a virtual chamber as everybody else did. And we kept telling our members now more than ever, you need your town square. We are your virtual town square, you can’t go to the town square. And we saw our retention rates go up because we just kept reaching out and contacting our members and being that virtual connecting point for them. So convening is critically important. A lot of times chambers get criticized on oh they just have events. That’s all they do. Being that place where they business people can come together and the business community can gather is important to the community. So don’t let that criticism slow you down. Competition was the fourth factor, competition, not those that are against you. But for those good volunteers that you want, and those budget dollars that you need to succeed, there’s a lot of competition for their time and their financial resources. So you have to prove your worth, in that loud, crowded arena, that they want to focus on you. And they want to be part of who you are and what you’re doing. So competition for their time, and competition for their scarce valuable resources. critically important. And the fifth item was self promotion. Everything we do in the chamber world staff does all the work we give our volunteers all the credit, we know that a majority of the work, I should say in case any volunteer ceases. But we don’t tell our story well enough on volunteer, Jane Doe did this at the Chamber of Commerce, they worked with us at the chamber to get this done. So telling our story on why it matters. And the impact of what we do matters to our members is critically important. So that self promotion through storytelling is really what can make your organization strong, impactful humanizes a big organization, and gets people to say I want to be a part of that. So those five factors are the ones that I wrote about in more detail in the dissertation.
Brandon Burton 21:33
Absolutely, those are, I can see why those five factors kind of rose to the top. And I can see as you as you gave attention to competition in the community for for resources and volunteers and time that the competition factor is going to point to those other factors as well right to be able to show your value, and why they should be you know, giving money and time and effort towards your organization. So I’m also a big fan of the self promotion, the storytelling, I tried to get chambers, you know, across the country to do podcast and especially coming through the pandemic when you couldn’t convene together and traditional ways. There’s ways of telling stories, telling the stories, your members telling the success that your chamber had and helping other businesses be successful. So there’s a lot of different avenues of doing that with the self promotion. Are there other other I don’t wanna say factors? Because that might, you know, muddy the definitions here, these five key factors, but are there other elements that stood out to you in your research that you found eye opening? Or maybe he hadn’t given a lot of thought to before that that just stood out that are worth mentioning?
Bob Rohrlack 22:48
Well, you know, I’m gonna flip the question upside down. Because there was, there were two things that stood out that I was really surprised with, in a not so great way. Okay. Those five factors didn’t really surprise me. But I was surprised at the alignment between the volunteer leader and the paid staff leader. The they all lined up except convening and competition were flipped from the staff to the volunteer. But what gave me great concern, and you actually picked up on it when you commented that I’ve memorized and I know our mission statement, not one interview, when asked about how do they define effectiveness? How do they measure their effectiveness? mentioned their mission statement? A strategic plan, a mission plan? Any kind of plan? Not one? Oh, wow. Why do you have your plan? If it’s not how you, you know, measure, figure your your effectiveness? And how do you know you’re being effective if you don’t even mention your plan. So that taught me that we really need to make sure we are aligning to our vision plan and that it matters. And we’re putting it in front of the members all the time and helping them to focus on here’s how to engage and be a part of who we are. So if there’s one takeaway, besides, people can download the dissertation, know your mission statement, not just that you can recite it, but that you know it and you’re thinking how to apply it and live in your organization. And if you have a strategic plan and vision plan and operation plan, some type of plan, know your plan, not memorize a big plan, but know how to apply and how to how to plug it into what you’re doing. Our entire team at our chamber knows, if you have an idea, don’t even come to present it if you can’t align it to at least one of the pillars that I mentioned previously. The more pillars you can align it to the better your chance of getting support both financial and time. But that vision plan matters. We report every year how we are aligning to that vision plan. The day after the annual meeting. I tell the team we start writing the story for next year today. a CIO, you have, you’ve got to know that and that was the big surprise takeaway that people didn’t talk about their vision plan, their mission statement or any kind of strategic plan.
Brandon Burton 25:12
Yeah, that is that is I mean, it’s not surprising just for the experience that I’ve seen, but at the same time, it is kind of shocking that that’s not more central in decision making, and, and being able to measure success and effectiveness. And our our chamber
Bob Rohrlack 25:29
years ago, was known as chamber does your whatever the issue or the idea of that your chairman was, that’s what everybody got rallied around. When they pass the gavel, they dropped the issue, we picked up the next issue. It’s hard to align people and keep moving progressively as an organization to impact the issues you want to impact if you’re turning all the time. So we our vision plan serves, these are the bumpers, here’s how we’re going to work towards these issues. And it really was impactful during the COVID years, when we were trying to be impactful to the members, but kept working on that vision and relaying that to the members. And what we were doing is we reached out to every member and touched them as much as we could let them know we cared about them, and how are they doing through the process,
Brandon Burton 26:17
right. And when you’re constantly changing direction each year, every other year, it makes it really hard for your community to understand what the chamber does, right. And when you talk about, you know, the keys and measuring effectiveness of the chamber I think of with ACC does a good job. I think when it comes down to the chamber the year you know, each year they select these finalists after doing the the chamber benchmarking surveys and everything. And being able to measure effectiveness in their community with the impact that these chambers. So they’re measuring effectiveness by impact in their community, which you should be able to look to your community and they see these things that you’re doing to to further a positive cause throughout the community. And of course, it is intentionally left vague as I say that because it should go back to your mission and your vision statement. And every chamber is going to be slightly different with that. But for the most part, it’s promoting business and promoting good community environment.
Bob Rohrlack 27:21
Right. And as we were looking at starting to vision plan, and so we want to be a diverse organization, we realize our diversity of our members wasn’t matching the county, what are we going to do? So we started researching that and looking at who’s doing what to support minority businesses. We kept digging kept looking. It was a three year study period for us. We couldn’t find quantifiable research and data on the status of the minority business community. In our county, again, our county being the most diverse county in the region. So I got support from the board. We hired an economist, and we studied the minority business community here in the county. And what we found out and this is several years ago was about 48% of the privately owned businesses are black are Hispanic owned, that’s a great stat to have our community. But at the time, their impact was only 5% of the GDP. That is a problem. So that we kept researching what how can we plug into this not stepping on somebody’s toes without replicating another program, what we could do. ACCE helped us we looked at other programs around the country. But we wound up developing our minority business accelerator program. It’s a two year cohort program. Companies have to apply to be in they have a small amount of skin in the game. And it’s a deep dive helping them work to make their business stronger so they can grow. As then we track them for three years after they finished the two year cohort program. It’s it’s proven to be very successful slow start is folks, does the chamber mean it and they really want to do this. But now we’re we have companies coming to saying I want to get in I want to get in, I want to be part of this program. And we’re seeing the diversity of our membership as an organization change in the right direction as well, which is one of the big benefits we were aiming for. So the process of studying the issue, being knowledgeable on the issue before we acted on the issue helped us have a stronger impact that we’re still having in that area today.
Brandon Burton 29:32
Yeah, and I think it’s so important to look at key aspects like that to be able to see where, you know, these column, the key indicator where you you see a percentage of minority owned businesses in the community, but then the impact on the economy in the community and seeing that disparity and being able to make a difference there. And I see. Oftentimes when you see minority focused chambers that pop up, whether it’s a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce or African American Chamber of Commerce, they tend to sprout up in their origins because they don’t feel like they’re being represented well in the business community. And if there’s a seat at the table, if they really are being looked at as any other business and really trying to have that, that positive impact in the economy and and building one community, instead of fragments, here and there, it really gives everybody a place to call home and really that convening power of businesses in general,
Bob Rohrlack 30:30
right, and we talk to the diversity chambers, from the point of we get it, it makes sense for you all to want to get together with your common bond. But don’t forget to make sure we’re all working together as well. So we don’t create islands, because islands will just feed what we’re identifying as the problem not getting us to the solution. And so, we’ve worked very hard to show that we are in this together with every other chamber in our region. And you know, we all succeed better together than trying to go along, just working from that philosophy.
Brandon Burton 31:04
Absolutely. So important having that that synergy, even amongst the chambers in a community or in a region to be able to align those, those purposes. So Right. So Bob, I wanted to ask, if for a chamber listening, who is interested in taking their organization up to the next level, what tip or action item might you share with them to to help accomplish that goal?
Bob Rohrlack 31:32
To do that, you got to know where you are, you got to know what’s working and what’s not working. But the why and try to stay away from anything anecdotal. The data driven, was when we were asking our members for diversity information. Some would give it some what not. So we made a stronger push to get that information. And we got a little bit of pushback, why are you asking Is it because you measure what matters, we want our organization to be more diverse. And then a great unintended consequence, as we focused on that. And we were more open about it, other organizations in the region. So you know, we need to be thinking about that, too. We need to be focusing on that. There’s another organization that when our when companies graduate, from our minority business accelerator, they give them a year membership in their organization to help introduce them to what they’re doing. So we’re seeing that we’re all going to succeed better together this way. But know the data of your organization? How did you get to where you are? What’s been your economic trend? What’s been your, your membership trend? on whatever issue you’re working on? How was it trajectory? What’s the trajectory for it and the market and go to your leadership, with data, and nothing deals with an issue better than just being able to put data in fact, in front of them? Not anecdotal? That was one of the problems when we were researching the minority program, I met with a lot of different groups. I got a lot of anecdotal suggestions. And you ought to you should do this, do that, where I came from that that and the other. And I said, that’s wonderful. Can you get the program information? Can you what data do you have, that you can share with me? No one had it. I said, Well, how can you advise where to go if you don’t know where you are? So you really need to know what the situation is, whatever your topic is, and how you’re working on it.
Brandon Burton 33:26
Yeah. And in today’s world, it’s easier than ever to collect data. That’s right, and to be able to reference it and digest it in a way that makes sense to chart a path forward.
Bob Rohrlack 33:35
And some folks may know this, I didn’t until I started the DBA program. We all know Google and searching on Google. But in the academic community, there’s a whole nother lane of Google called Google scholars. And it’s the peer reviewed academic research angle. And if you don’t have access to it, talk to your university about helping you to be able to get access to it. But that will get you the the research papers that have been done on the topic you’re looking for. And there’s a ton out there. I know everything about chambers, that I’ve tried to start in Africa, and other areas that didn’t really fit in apply to what we’re doing United States. But as I was trying to find United States research, I saw how much is out there for other areas. So definitely tap into Google scholars.
Brandon Burton 34:28
It’s a great tip. So, Rob, I like asking everyone to have on the show as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Bob Rohrlack 34:42
Another good question. When I first got into the chamber world, a long time ago, it was we’re the business organization we help businesses succeed and grow about so they can hire more people and that’s our focus. There are other groups focusing on the social issues in the community. That’s great. They’re good they need to focus on that as well. But this is the lane we have. And it was a pretty hard and fast lane. If anything we’ve seen over the last several years, it’s not that way anymore. We need to be more concerned about how those issues are impacted. Everything that goes on, for example, we did an event late last year on human trafficking, and the impact that it has to the region, for the reasons of human trafficking, and the sex exploitation industry, but there’s also normal jobs that you would see regular jobs, where people are being trafficked to work in jobs that form well below minimum wage that you may not even know. So how do we help elevate from that, and the human trafficking connection to incarceration, to the foster care system, to unemployment, it connects throughout the whole economy. So we wanted our members to be more aware of it. And we have people who work within the industries in organizations to combat that Industry Council will help people as they’re exiting, and just trying to work on that. So that’s just an example of chambers, I think, really, in the future have got to figure away, and it’s unique to each community. What are some of the social service issues they could partner with and get their members to help and be involved in the economy is not as rigid as it was, it’s impacting everything. And we’ve got to have a more caring approach. Beyond just business success.
Brandon Burton 36:42
Like that, it’s going to show more of what that impact is that effectiveness of the chambers to get involved with the social service issues this year, right as he called them. But Bob, this has been a fun conversation. It’s been it’s been fun to to learn more of the research that you found and, and the work you had to do to to get down to this research, since it wasn’t just available to research on your own. I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you learn more about the research your dissertation, what would be the best way to reach out and connect.
Bob Rohrlack 37:21
Yeah, the best way, you go to our website, TampaBayChamber.com. And see the different things we’re doing our vision plan is there and in the measurables, how we’re tracking for the vision plan. And I can be reached through email, first initial last name, so brohrlack@tampabaychamber.com. But if you go to TampaBayChamber.com, you can find me there. And then it’s googling the dissertation that will come up. And then the other articles that I’ve had published because I’ve made that a goal to get more research on chambers of commerce in the United States, in scholarly publications. So I’ve had a couple things published already. So just just, they can all be found. But I’m happy to help anybody anyway, I can.
Brandon Burton 38:11
Good deal. And we can try to do too. And our show notes will have your contact information, but we can try to link directly to your dissertation. So people want to go there and find that and maybe save some Google searching and poking around. And I can just go straight to the show notes for this episode. But Bob, this has been a good conversation, you’ve shined a lot of light on the work that Chambers of Commerce do and in particular with how they go about being effective in servicing their communities. So thank you for sharing this with us. It’s been an insightful conversation from a very unique perspective. So I do appreciate that.
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