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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.
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You’re joining us for a special episode and our 2024 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series and our guests for this episode is Zeb Welborn. Zeb is the President of the Chino Valley Chamber of Commerce and Wellborn Social Media dedicated to promoting local businesses through growth and digital marketing. And award winning executives Zeb is passionate about connecting with driven individuals and fostering community development through initiatives like Upskill Chino Valley, recognized as the 2023, Executive of the Year by WACE, he continues to excel in leadership and service. Zeb, I want to welcome you to Chamber Chat Podcast are excited to have you with us today and say big congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a chamber the year finalists this year, wanted to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.
Zeb Welborn 2:09
Well, thank you so much. So we are very excited about that opportunity. Thank you for the opportunity to chat with you here today. Yeah, we’re our team is very excited about it. And then let’s see something interesting about myself. I was a national champion soccer player back in my younger days, and I bowled the 300. So those are the two things that I have on my resume that are not on my resume. Wow.
Brandon Burton 2:35
So you’re not competitive at all right?
Zeb Welborn 2:40
Yeah, there’s definitely a little competitive streak in me for sure. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 2:43
that’s awesome. Those are, those are two really cool facts. So tell us a little bit about the Chino Valley Chamber just to give us an idea of the scope of work size staff budget to kind of preface for our conversation today.
Zeb Welborn 2:57
Sure, so the Chino Valley Chamber represents two cities, we represent Chino and Chino Hills, both of them have a population of I think around 95,000 or so. So it’s almost 200,000 people. It’s a high growth area. So there’s like Chino was named one of the top 10 boom towns in the boom towns in the country, either last year or the year before. I have friends that come out from the military, they’ll be back in town every two or three years in the city looks totally different every time it comes out. So we’re we’re in the suburbs of LA and in Orange County. So all of the people that are working in those areas have kind of shifted out to where we live. Our budget is about $1.1 million. We have about eight staff members. When I started our budget was about $150,000. And we had three part time members including myself, so that was about six years ago. So we’ve grown a lot in the last six years as a as a community but also as the chamber. So that’s something that I am super proud of is kind of helping our chamber turnarounds and challenges they’re facing when I got brought in and now we’re kind of rocking and rolling. And I’m super proud of the work that that that I’ve done but also that our team has accomplished as well. Ya know, that
Brandon Burton 4:12
is something to be proud of for sure. That’s some some great growth. And I will say I I lived in South Orange County for a while and it seemed like everybody was moving out your direction. So I’ve seen the growth you know, almost firsthand I’ll say secondhand, you know, seeing a lot of people we knew moving out your direction. Yeah, lots of growth though. Lots of opportunity. So on these chamber, their finalist episodes we’d like to spend the majority of our conversation most of the time in this interview talking about the two programs that were submitted on your chamber the your application. So we’ll we’ll dive in deep on what those two those two programs are as soon as we get back from this quick break.
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Alright, Zeb we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re going to spend some time talking about the two programs that were on your application for chamber the year. So introduce this with the first program is that you’d like to highlight with us today.
Zeb Welborn 7:01
So I’m hoping I can remember that too. We do a lot of different programs. But one of them for sure is our upskill Chino Valley program. So that is one that we initiated two or three years ago, and it was to address the needs of our workforce development shortage in our area. So right after COVID. I mean, when COVID happened, we’re very proactive to making sure that our business had access to resources have access to all of the things that they needed. And so we got a lot of recognition for the work that we did during that time. And a lot of businesses, you know, stayed in business because of the work that we were able to do at that point in time. But then immediately following, as you’re driving around town, you would see just help wanted signs everywhere. So our community had help wanted signs everywhere. Everybody was doing hiring. So you know, that was a big challenge facing our businesses. So then, concurrently, I was taking some classes with the US Chamber, and some other just other professional development learnings. And I came to realize that this workforce development shortage, and this is a stuff that they would teach us to the US Chamber is that this is going to be impacting communities for a while. There’s kind of this forecast of the 10 years of challenges, at least when it comes to workforce and finding good qualified workers. So that’s one of the things that we wanted to try to tackle for our community, how can we make sure that we were being better to better supportive of our businesses to help find their workforce needs. So we looked at it in the short term, but we also looked at in the long term, so trying to create solutions in the short term and long term. So we came up with four things that we thought that if we executed on these things, it would help not only solve the short term issues, but it would help solve the long term issues. So the short term issue is workforce development. So we started doing a lot of job fairs, a lot of one on one placements, we started partnering with our workforce, San Bernardino County Workforce Development, our local Chaffey College, our local school district. So we created these partnerships, we’re trying to build a pipeline of workers for our businesses. And so through that we’ve placed at least 350 job seekers in local jobs in our community, we have helped place at least 100 I want to say about 100 interns from the high school and college level with local businesses to help build the next generation of workforce in our businesses, and and build those connections between business owners and leaders and in the educational institutions that are around us. We did a lot of work with Chaffey College to help make sure that we’re building those strong connections. So that’s a short term solution, I think, or means short term and long term. But then the longer the more longer term. approaches were three things. So it was economic development. These are things that chambers normally do but economic development, leadership development and entrepreneurship development. So economic development, well we started doing was these roundtable discussions. So we’re doing two a month where we’re bringing in businesses from a specific sector or specific industry, or we’re bringing cross industries together, identifying pain points, and then creating action items and our chamber can take action on. So we’ve been doing that extensively for the last two years or so we’re about two years into our program. The next one is leadership development, we did not have a leadership program in our community. So we started one. So leadership developed, we have 25 leaders, we go and tour different business locations and sites around town connecting our businesses with business owners that are running some of the larger businesses in town and making sure that our leadership is strong. If you don’t have strong leaders, you’re gonna have employees that leave. So we want to make sure we develop strong leaders in our community. And then the last thing is entrepreneurship development, which is just enhancing the work that we do and are educating businesses on how to be better in business. So I think one of the gaps is where we’re making sure that we have business owners training, the business leaders that are coming up in our community and making sure that we’re having business owners training our up and coming entrepreneurs in our community.
Brandon Burton 11:03
So with that, the two that really stood out to me is the leadership development. So I know we have a leadership development and entrepreneur development. So with the leadership development, have you guys gotten to gotten through to full classes yet? Or where are you at in that, that process? And what does it look like at this point with the leadership development? Yeah, so
Zeb Welborn 11:26
we’re just about to finish year two, it’s been a great successful opportunity. Oh, and I didn’t mention this in the beginning. But that upskill Chino Valley program, we essentially pitched it to one of our legislators, and so they allocated a million dollars of state funding towards our programming. So that allows us to execute on this work. It’s a lot of work to do that stuff. And so I’m always like, how, how can we get the funding to actually execute on his work? So we pitched that, and that was something that they thought was needed for our community. So we were able to secure those which allowed us to do all this work. So this is our second year, we, our first year was highly successful, one of the things that we commit to doing as a community good project during that leadership program as well. So they do something good for the community. Last year, they bought AED machines to help in case somebody goes into cardiac arrest, we put them in three different businesses around town. So there’s a cost that was incurred that so we helped raise that those funds for that. This year, we’re doing helping our local community theater or children’s community theater. So we’re raising funds so that they can train more kids in the in the theatrical arts. And and it’s been, it’s been great. So yeah, you’re too we’re almost done. We got about two months left. Awesome.
Brandon Burton 12:40
And then with the entrepreneurial development, I’m always curious with entrepreneurs, and how to how chambers get connected with him in the first place to match them up with other business owners. And you know, a lot of times entrepreneurs have that bug of I’m going to do this by myself. Yeah, I can. I’m going to figure this out. And it tends to be the hard path, right? So what what are some of the ways you guys are connecting with entrepreneurs and helping to kind of bring them out and connect them with the right people.
Zeb Welborn 13:09
So I feel like I feel like I’m an entrepreneur, right. So I joined actually joined my chamber as a member back in like 2010, or 2011 or so. And when I joined, what I was looking for was mentors, I was I didn’t want to make those mistakes. I wanted to find people in my community that I could look up to that I could learn from. And there’s a couple of people that I thought of like there was a guy that ran our newspaper, there’s also the guy that ran the local golf course. So these are two guys that I was kind of hoping to connect with. And they were they were loosely connected to the chamber. So I joined the chamber not knowing when the chamber really was good. But I thought like, what I was really looking for was the business organization that I could turn to that I could get mentorship. And there wasn’t really anything in my community except for the Chamber of Commerce. So when I came across the chamber, and I kind of went into the first day, it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. But there wasn’t anything else. And so my thought was was well either I could work like a you try to make that happen inside of the chamber community. Or I could try it like you said, do it on my own. So I obviously opted to get involved in my chamber and see if there are ways that I can help make this a system that worked out well for people like me, they get to come into business and get advice and mentorship from successful business owners. So that’s one of the things that I’ve had a passion for since I started and and now we’re, we’re we’re doing that. So we’re trying to there’s lots of different ways to go about doing that. I’ll share that we do a lot of business trainings and business development. So we do a business workshop. It used to be once a week, but we’re doing it once every other week. Right now, because we found that that cadence worked out better for our members, but we are trying to shift some strategies around to offer more. One of the exciting things that has happened for us and this is very new. So this was before I submitted our proposal was we just got accepted. So we submitted an appropriations request for an audit To bring an entrepreneurship center into our community that would be facilitated and managed by the chamber. So that’s something that we submitted for it’s been approved through the first phase of the process, we have no idea if it’s actually going to get funded or not. But at least it’s very exciting because that was a selected project out of, I think, 10, or 15, they’re able to choose every year. So we’re one of those 10 or 15. So we’re excited because we feel like that could be a good opportunity for our business, and business community. So that’s something we are excited about. And so we but we’re making ranking progress to try to develop more entrepreneurial programming, to making sure that we are have a space that we can do that stuff with, and that we’re bringing potential entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs and collaboration and connection with people who have made it happen and Bennett themselves here in the Inland Empire. Yeah.
Brandon Burton 15:47
Oh, that is great. And I’m sure along the way, you’re seeing you know, upticks in those different, you know, measurements to be able to see with with workforce, and hopefully seeing a few less help wanted signs and, and being able to fill some of those voids and needs throughout the community. As we kind of shift gears Do you would you like to introduce what the second program is that you guys submitted on your chamber, the your application?
Zeb Welborn 16:18
So if I had to guess I would say was the entrepreneur, the leadership program that we discussed already. So that was the part of it. So that leadership program is something that we are very proud of? It has, we have, we’re coming up on 50 graduates in the next two months, and I think it was just something that was missing in our community that we really needed. And that we wanted to. Yeah, it was just that there’s been a lot of things that have happened in our community that are kind of ostracized, ostracize people from one another. And when we bring people together, prior to those situations happening, solutions come together much more quickly, their people are able to collaborate much more better. And so building these relationships and connections with these different entities in town just plays a huge role in making sure that our community can stay connected, and looking at opportunities to focus on growth versus opportunities, where we’re looking for division amongst each other. So that’s something that we’re excited about the the collaborative work that we’ve been doing with our businesses, making sure they’re connected with our city and, and legislators and educational institutions, and all those things. When we do that. We feel like we’re doing really good work.
Brandon Burton 17:29
Yeah. So I love leadership programs and the whole purpose behind them. And I know every chamber has a little slightly different approach and how they go about it. But do you guys put a limit on how many, how many participants? How many students are involved with leadership programs? Is there an application process? Who reviews that? What? What’s it like to become part of the leadership class?
Zeb Welborn 17:52
Yeah, so we do, we do have like an interview process. So it’s, the number is 25 that we shoot for. And that’s because, you know, some of our touring locations have a restriction on how many people can go through it. So we found that 25 is a good number, because it’s manageable. And also, we’re able to tour the sites with one visit versus multiple visits. So that’s been a good number for us. They do do an interview. So they have to be interviewed and selected in and we actually went, I went through the corona leadership, the corona Chamber Leadership Program. So I kind of modeled a lot of what we do after them. And my understanding is, is that they model it after the Riverside chamber. So we still in use a lot of stuff from each other. But that’s, that’s what we do. And then we don’t really do any leadership training, we mostly build collaboration and connection and do tour visits. So we go visit different locations, give these business owners an opportunity to talk about their business and the work that they do. And then they provide a tour to our members, they get back behind the scenes look at what other organizations and businesses have to go through on a daily basis to make sure that their operation runs successfully. And so when you do that, there’s a lot of eye opening things that happen you realize how intricate and how much goes into these businesses and organizations. And so it gives gives people a bigger perspective. I mean, the biggest thing though, the biggest advantage is just the collaboration and connection is built because we’ve seen firsthand how many people get connected with each other for bigger projects that help support our community and a high one, which is we had somebody who was going through our program. She’s a leadership coach or professional business coach, and we toured our local so we have the California institution for men is located in our community. So we toured the prison and while we’re touring the prison, she got connected with somebody who was Aristotle I got in the I would love to speak to your your inmates to talk about you know, things that they can do to turn their life around and So she gets she came in and spoke to the I guess it was a large contingent was maybe like 100 200 inmates about leadership and challenges. And so that was a connection that was built through that. And because of that, I feel like it did good things for our community for the inmates that were there for the business owner. That was the business coach that was going through it. And so it’s just kind of like a win win win. That was a result of the work that we helped facilitate.
Brandon Burton 20:25
That’s really cool. So throughout the year, the leadership program, but how many visits site visits do you guys do? Or do you shoot for?
Zeb Welborn 20:34
Yeah, it’s what we go once a month, and it’s three site visits a day, so. So it’s one day, it’s about a full day. So they started around nine, and a three, so not not quite a full day, but nine to three, and we visit three different locations. So we’ll do one or two in the morning, and then we’ll have lunch, and then we’ll do one in the afternoon. And then we call it a day. Sometimes it’s fuck. It’ll move around based on the sites that we’re visiting. But that’s kind of the rough outline.
Brandon Burton 21:05
Yeah. And then just out of curiosity, how are you selecting the sites to go visit? Is it based on the applicants are just trying to figure out needs or what what goes into that thought process?
Zeb Welborn 21:17
So I’ll say it’s industry specific, we look, you know, we want to highlight each of the image industries that are represented in our community. So the first couple of days is with our city. So we go toward the behind the scenes of the cities. And then we have a healthcare day, there’s a Manufacturing Day, there’s a logistics day, there’s a small business day. What else do we do? Well, we visit public safety. So we have kind of a Public Safety Day. So I guess, those are the things that we do try to focus on. And we tried to make them days so that there’s a theme behind them, but sometimes just the way that the visits work out, we’ll move them around. But that’s the main gist. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 21:56
I like that idea, though, having a theme for for those visits each day. And kind of building the mindset around that about why is public safety important in our community. And as a developing leader, how does that play into my development and being able to make those connections going forward. So I see that across the board with the different themes that you guys tried to target. So I appreciate that. So I’d like asking everyone that I have on the podcast, especially as you guys are a chamber, the year finalist this year, kind of at the top of your game, so to speak. It, I’d like to see if there’s any kind of tip or action item that you might offer for chambers out there who were interested in taking their chamber to the next level.
Zeb Welborn 22:46
Well, when I saw when I joined the chamber that thing, as a as a member, I just remember thinking like this is not the hub of the business community. This is not what I was anticipating being like the business organization that represents business. And I don’t know if that’s the same case, for chambers across the place, I guess what how I would describe it is, when I showed up to different meetings and stuff, it was a lot of people that had retired from their careers. And we’re kind of doing a second career to make income on the side. So I was by like the youngest person by 30 years that was participating in those programs. It didn’t have the people that were running like big successful businesses in town participating in those programs. And so in my mind, I was saying like, like, this doesn’t make any sense to me, like there should be a way that business owners in a community can come together to support one another to grow the business community at large. So that’s kind of like, I guess, just my thought when I was coming into it. And so I’ve just worked really hard on trying to build that. So I think the thing that surprises me sometimes is the approach some of my colleagues make is, like, I looked at us as leaders of our business community. And so when I say leaders, one, we should not be operating the best business in our community. So we should have be running the most successful business in town, we shouldn’t be modeling that business behavior to our business owners, and then we should be compensated like successful business owners. And so when I started my role, like there was no way I could live in my community with the salary that they were offering. And so, but it’s not just like given to us, like we have to work for it. We have to be those leaders in business, we have to run a successful business. And then if we do run a successful business, we have to seek compensation for the work that we do in that regard. So I think that’s my one piece of advice is treat it like a business, be proactive and growing that business. And then if you focus on doing those two things, I think you’re gonna be putting yourself in a great position to lead your business community because you’re modeling what it is to be a successful business and your businesses will will learn from that more than they would if you’re just trying to help them and suffering at the expense of supporting your local businesses. I think it’s important to model successful business behavior to the members of the chamber. Yeah.
Brandon Burton 25:06
And I think yeah, at our heart, I think most people know that and believe that, but to hear it said, and to kind of reinvigorate that, yes, we do need to be that model that template to be able to show how to run a good business. So then businesses can look to you and trust what you have to say, if it builds trust in the within the business community. If you’re just a hot mess of a chamber, it’s really hard to, to get buy in as a business to think that this chamber knows what to do you know what to offer me any kind of advice or anything like that. As we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Zeb Welborn 25:55
So that’s a good question. I, I mean, I see it, and I’ll just speak for my community, right, I saw a lot of opportunity when I came in, like, I feel like I’m an entrepreneur, and then I kind of moved towards where the opportunities are most prevalent. I feel like there is a great opportunity for Chambers of Commerce right now. I think that everybody is trying to get connected with business owners. And there’s a lot of light, and I’ll just say like federal funding, but it’s not just federal funding, it’s even like, when you’re running your business getting connected with business owners, it’s not an easy thing to do. Businesses are more strapped than ever for time. And I’ll say that attribute that to the internet, social media, digital marketing, you’re on 24/7. Whereas in prior to the internet, you did not have to be on 24/7, you could work the normal workdays, and then you have the evenings and weekends off. And and now if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re you’re grinding it out 24/7. And that’s how I’ve been doing it for the last 10 years. So I just know how busy chambers have. I know how busy businesses are, but they do need people to speak up for them in these roles and capacities. And so we’ve been participating in these collaboratives, where there’s like this, this federal funding that is coming or the state funding that is coming for programs that are designed to help support businesses, yet there are zero businesses at the table in these conversations. So that’s where everybody is trying to talk to business owners, but business owners don’t have time to sit around and waste time in these meetings that seem really unproductive and don’t get anything accomplished. Even though there is going to be a strong outcome at the end, they don’t have the time to invest in that type of work. So they need a representative, those organizations that are looking to support business community, they need a representative. And so chambers are uniquely positioned in a way where we have immediate access to the businesses that are represented through our membership. And we can turn and talk to them. And we can pick up the phone and they will answer and they will respond to our emails, and they will get in touch with us. And that’s what is needed by a lot of these entities trying to get in touch with businesses. So I think I see a lot of opportunity, I still see a lot of opportunity for our chamber and the work that we’re doing. And I feel like other chambers have that same opportunity as well. Yeah, I like that.
Brandon Burton 28:07
I like that response was that I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners out there who may want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you guys are doing things there at the Chino Valley Chamber, what would be the best ways for them to reach out and connect with you.
Zeb Welborn 28:25
So my business got me involved in chamber was social media marketing. So I was fairly early on the social media marketing train, so you can find me very easily. My dad was a reporter for the Orange County Register. So I think he named me with the intention of that my name would make a great byline in a news story, you know, like the the article by Warren. So nobody has my name, Zeb Welborn, you can find me anywhere @zebwelborn, I am on all the socials. And I’d be happy to connect with you if anybody wants to chat or ask any questions. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 29:02
that was very kind of your father do give you a name that nobody else says. Well, it’s
Zeb Welborn 29:08
it’s good and bad. So if I if I if there’s something that comes up bad about me, it’s very easy to find. But if if I’m doing good work, then that’s also easy to find as well. So it’s a is that?
Brandon Burton 29:20
The right path? Right? Yeah, exactly. I
Zeb Welborn 29:22
don’t think it was thinking about the digital marketing age where you can search up, you do Google searches. That wasn’t a thing back then. But yeah, for sure.
Brandon Burton 29:30
That’s right. That was it. I appreciate it. It’s been fun having you on the podcast today and learning where you guys are doing there it’s Chino Valley Chamber and make an impact in your community. And I wish you and your team the best of luck is chamber the year.
Zeb Welborn 29:43
Awesome. Thank you very much.
Brandon Burton 29:46
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