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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 in our 2025 ACCE chamber of the year finalist series. And our guest for this episode is Jodi Owczarski, representing the Michigan West Coast Chamber. Jodi is the President and CEO of the Michigan West Coast Chamber of Commerce, a role that she’s held since September of 2022 after joining the chamber in 2017 with a diverse background as a small business owner, nonprofit leader, HR professional and operational Operations Director for an international consulting firm. Jodi brings a wealth of experience to her leadership, known for her passion and community involvement. She currently serves on over 10 boards and committees, including the US Chamber of Commerce Committee of 100 and the ACCE board of directors. Jodi holds a bachelor’s in psychology from Michigan State University. Jodi, I’m excited to have you back with us on chamber chat podcast. Congratulations again to you and your team as being selected as chamber of the year finalists. I’d love for you to say hello to the audience and to share something interesting about yourself. I mentioned before we started recording, you’re one of the few three piece that we’ve had on Chamber Chat Podcast, so we’re getting to know you pretty well, but share something interesting so you can get to know you better.
Jodi Owczarski 2:27
Awesome. Thanks. Brandon, truly such a privilege to be able to be a part of your podcast. I love listening, and it’s a privilege to be able to be a part of it as a guest. I don’t remember what I shared, something interesting. I don’t think it was this, but my kids are all grown now and married, but when they were younger, we started switching up how we would give gifts, and we stopped giving things, and instead worked on giving each other opportunities and experiences. And for me, that turned into a huge love for travel, going to experience different cultures and different communities. And at this point, I think I’ve been to nearly 40 different countries, and I am just getting started. So love traveling across the US and and abroad.
Brandon Burton 3:18
So as a travel expert, what’s, what’s, maybe your top two or three places that you’ve traveled to,
Jodi Owczarski 3:25
you know, from an exotic location, I think Fiji is, is my favorite. The culture there was phenomenal. They love Americans because of the the role that we played in the war. And so they love to welcome us to their country, everyone’s family, but from a I could live here standpoint Spain, that may be a part of my retirement plan. We’ll see what
Brandon Burton 3:49
happens. I love it. It’s awesome. Well, tell us a little bit about the Michigan, West Coast chamber, just to set the stage for our discussion today. It’s always helpful to know the size of chamber, the scope of work. You guys are involved with staff budget, just to prepare us for our conversation today.
Jodi Owczarski 4:09
Sure, so West Coast chamber. We often people think we must be on the West Coast of the United States, but we’re on the third coast. So we’re on the western shores of Lake Michigan. In Holland, Michigan, we’ve got a population in Holland of about 35,000 but we serve a larger community of about 120,000 out $120,000 120,000 people. In our target market, our community is a little bit unique in that we have three major economic drivers. We have a large manufacturing base. We also have a huge focus on agriculture and tourism. I think it’s unique that we serve all three of those economic drivers. Our chamber as an organization, is strictly a Chamber of Commerce in our community. We have a separate. CVB and economic development organization. So we focus strictly on chamber function. As of today, we have 1228 members. We track them down to the exact number, and we serve those members with a team of seven our budget this fiscal year was just under $1.5 million in revenue. Happy to say that with three months to go in our fiscal year, we blew past that number. So I’m hoping that we end up closer to the 16165,
Brandon Burton 5:36
this fiscal year. That’s awesome. You guys are are running strong and awesome. So that’s why you’re here today, right? So with these chamber of the year finalist episodes, I like to spend the majority of our time really diving into the two programs that were submitted on your chamber of the year application. So we’ll take a quick break, and when we get back, we’ll dive into those.
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Brandon Burton 9:41
All right, Jodi, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’ll spend some time today focusing on the two programs on your chamber, the year application. I know one of them you’ve kind of expanded on for those who listen to the show regularly, Jodi was on last year as a chamber. Your finalist as well, and you talked about your community impact day. But you guys have have significantly grown that you want to tell us about that program first. Kind of, maybe it helps to start with the origins. And people can always go back to episode two, 286 to listen to that episode again, where you go granular on the you know what it was like last year, but kind of give us the origin and what you guys have done with it this year.
Jodi Owczarski 10:25
Absolutely. So community impact day started as an offshoot for our leadership program. As we wrapped that program up at the end of the year, we were looking for tangible ways for that class to go out and serve and so we started reaching out to local organizations that may need just an extra hand for a few hours. And what we found was that it was a great opportunity for our class, and it provided tremendous support to those nonprofit organizations. And so over time, we started expanding both who we invited to serve, as well as the number of organizations that we were able to serve. And it turned into, literally, my favorite day of the year. You could cancel my birthday and Christmas and every other holiday, and I would be fine as long as I got to continue to have community impact day, being able to drive around our community to see all the sea of volunteers just flooding the community, literally makes me cry every year. Is just the best. The difference, though, for us this year and what we’ve done and what was part of our application is that we wanted to grow it even bigger. We talk all the time about turning ripples of influence into tidal waves of impact, and we wanted to turn our little ripples in our community into two waves that reached out more more broadly. And you know, one of the things Brandon that I love about this industry is that when we find something that’s good, instead of hoarding that and putting a patent on it and saying, This is our proprietary knowledge, we open things up, right? And we say, here’s the recipe, here’s the cookbook. Here are all the details that you need to be able to do, R and D, rip off and duplicate, right? And bring this to your community. And that’s what we did with community impact day. So we created an online toolkit with step by step instructions right down to here are the emails that you send. Here are the spreadsheets that you need. Here are the job forms that you need, every detail that you were going to need as an organization to launch this in your community within this online toolkit. Then we reached out to chambers in Michigan and said, we’d love to have you be a part of it, and we had a number of chambers that decided to join us in that process. And so this year, we were able to have six additional chambers in Michigan join us to grow that impact. We had meetings on a monthly basis to be able to walk alongside them, to support them through this process, so that it was as easy as could be for them to launch this you know, each of the chambers not unique to us. We all feel like we’re strapped thin, right? We’re doing a ton of work, and so adding new things in, especially big things, can be really challenging, and we wanted to take as much of that out of the process for them as possible, so that it could be a seamless, easy process to launch. And we couldn’t be more happy with how that turned out across Michigan this year. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 13:46
so you’re right about you guys finding things that work, and you’re very open to share it with others. A lot of people know the Michigan West Coast chamber, because the EOS system, you guys have been very open and transparent and sharing how that worked and how to implement it with amongst your organization. And now, you know, here’s you know, version, you know, it’s not, it’s not a build upon the EOS system, but here’s a 2.0 of another great system that’s being rolled out and being shared with chambers, you know, nation, statewide, nationwide.
Jodi Owczarski 14:15
Yeah, right. Well, that’s our goal, right? Is to bring it across the nation, because it works so well for us, the impact we’re able to make in our community is so significant that there’s just no reason why it can’t be replicated. You talk about Eos, and part of Eos is documenting your systems or your core processes, and it’s that that allowed us to share this easily, right? We’ve, we’ve got that whole process well documented. And so it was, it was easy for chambers to come alongside us and to follow the recipe and to be able to implement this in their community as well.
Brandon Burton 14:50
So I remember last year, you’re talking about like partnering with nonprofits in the community and driving around town, people wearing the T shirts and doing everything. So you. Give us an idea listeners who maybe are just hearing about community impact day for the first time, what did it look like in your community, and then as these six additional chambers adopted it this year, did it have a similar look and feel? Did they partner with other organizations so it had a different focus? Or, how did that evolve?
Jodi Owczarski 15:19
Great, great question. I think the biggest challenge to putting this on, aside from staff capacity, is finding enough meaningful volunteer opportunities. A lot of times, organizations don’t even understand what all we can come in and do with a group of well intended and dedicated volunteers. So in our community, we were able to serve 125 different locations during the day, with another 111 across the state. So over 235 locations had volunteered this year. What this looked like was that we all did this on the same day, at the same time, and wearing the same blue T shirts all across the state. The only thing that varied was we changed out the logo of the home chamber. And if they had sponsors that kind of bought space on the shirt as a part of the underwriting of the day, then that changed. But to see those blue shirts literally stretched from the west coast to the east coast of the state of Michigan, north to south. Amazing.
Brandon Burton 16:29
So I’m sure you’re entrenched, you know, in that day in your community. Did you get a chance to shoot over to any of the other communities and see in works? Or did you have to rely on pictures and and their feedback.
Jodi Owczarski 16:42
Yeah, you know, we we absolutely had to rely on pictures and their feedback. But the coolest thing Brandon the day wasn’t even done. The volunteers were still serving, and my phone was blowing up from my friends across the state, saying, everybody’s already asking, what’s the date for next year? And are we doing it again? And it’s like, Absolutely, we’re doing it again. So it quickly caught on across across the state. So we had set a goal for having 2025 volunteers for 2025 and we crossed the 3700 volunteer mark in in year one, not only did it impact how many people are involved, it was a great non dues revenue driver for both our chamber and for our chamber friends across the state. We set a goal of like $52,000 in non dues revenue this year, and we had $106,750 in non dues revenue. So this is revenue that would not have come to these chambers had they not participated, right? They were sponsoring this specific day. And so it’s just cool to be able to see that kind of revenue driven to these organizations.
Brandon Burton 17:58
Yeah, well, let’s talk about the non dues revenue for a minute. So is that all coming from sponsorships? What? What are the different aspects involved to generate the revenue?
Jodi Owczarski 18:08
Sure, all sponsorship. This is a sponsorship in our community that sells itself. People want to be involved with this. It’s a feel good thing. It’s high visibility. We get good press coverage, and they want to be associated with positivity like this. And so it’s a it’s a very easy sponsorship opportunity. There’s very little cost involved with doing this day, really the there’s two main costs. One is the T shirts, and those are essentials. Get a good t shirt this year, we helped underwrite the cost of those shirts for those initial chambers to launch. We wanted to remove that barrier, and we had plenty of sponsors that wanted to help us in that process. The other thing is the after party, it’s key to bring together these volunteers afterwards and to celebrate together as a community, the good work that just happened. And so that can be as expensive or inexpensive as you choose it to be, but that’s literally the only expense that’s associated. So those non dues revenue almost go completely to your bottom line.
Brandon Burton 19:16
Yeah, that’s awesome. So for your guys’s after party, do you go to a park or a venue or what? What’s your your place of choice for the party? Yeah. What have you done? Have you experimented?
Jodi Owczarski 19:27
Yeah, we’ve done a couple of different things. The last couple of years we’ve been at our community Civic Center, because it’s right in the core of of downtown. It’s got ample space for us to have hundreds or 1000s of people that come join us. We’ve got everything from food trucks and vendors and yard games and live music to just have effective atmosphere.
Brandon Burton 19:50
That’s awesome, yes. So for other chambers listening who might want to get involved in 2026 please. I guess what? Is the date, and where would you point them to be able to access that toolkit?
Jodi Owczarski 20:04
Yep. So the toolkit is on our website, at West Coast chamber.org and we are going to, we’re going to put a save the date out there for other chambers to be able to get on board. We’d love to do a webinar to dig into more details specifically on what it looks like to execute and to help support them along the way, we did some estimating Brandon this year, when we put together the numbers for year one and realized that if next year, every chamber that participated, if they just invited one chamber, and we just did that year over year for five years. What that would result in is more than $6 million in non dues revenue and saving our communities over $18 million in labor costs in five years. So the impact is just massive, right? And so I think that that is incredibly modest growth goals. I think that we can absolutely grow at a much higher rate than that. So in 2026 this will be happening on Wednesday, May 13. So we’d love to have any of your listeners join us in 2026 we’ll come alongside you. We’ll give you the tools and the resources that you need, and help answer any questions along the line, so that this can be as successful in your community as it has been in ours. That’s
Brandon Burton 21:33
awesome. Yeah, I can see the power, the networking effect of all the chambers that participate. They all know another one or two people in the industry that can benefit right, other communities, exactly, right? And it just continues to roll on. So yeah, you guys are starting a movement that’s awesome.
Jodi Owczarski 21:49
I hope so. Yeah, we need more of this, right, right?
Brandon Burton 21:53
I love it. Well, let’s shift gears to the other program that was submitted on your application around your chamber, Career Center, tell us how that got its start, and what the need was, and how you guys answered that need, sure.
Jodi Owczarski 22:07
So I moved into the CEO role in 2022 and as a part of that process, I went on a listening tour to understand what challenges our members are experiencing, what successes they’re having, what they’re thinking as they look forward and how we as an organization can better serve them to meet the needs that they have. Not surprisingly, the number one issue that came out of those conversations was a talent shortage that they just can’t find the individuals that they need to fill the roles that they have, and they certainly if they’re finding people, they’re not equipped in the way that they need them to be, they’re not upskilled in what they need them to be able to do. And so we knew that we needed to be more focused on this area. You know, we’ve long said that, oh, workforce development, leadership and talent development is a part of the work that we do, but I’ll say that it was not as direct as what we’re looking to do right now. We knew that we needed to lean in in a much more significant way and do more tangible work that could lead to a better outcome for our members. And so just over about two years ago, one of our community leaders approached me and they were doing some big work in the education space, and they asked if we would be willing to come alongside them to bridge the gap for high school and college students and young professionals. They were doing great work in the early ed space, reimagining education and what this looks like. But then there it dropped off, and all of a sudden, students were having to go to a traditional look and didn’t have as much experiential learning opportunities once they hit kind of that high school level. And so we said, Absolutely, this aligns with, I think, where we need to go from a from a workforce development standpoint. Through that process, I was able to find a tool called Youth Science. You science is an online assessment tool that’s a gamified assessment takes about 90 minutes to complete, but it helps identify each individual’s unique aptitude and how that can relate to a number of things, including future career what I loved about this, if you’ve got kids in school, they’ve undoubtedly taken career tests, right that tell them what they could and should be, but those tests in large part are based on your interests, and so it’s super easy to skew those responses to what you think you should be, or to be funny, my daughter thought it was really cute when she was in middle school and she could skew the answer to say she should be a bartender. See, I don’t have to go to college. College, because it’s pretty easy to figure out what they’re asking you and why, right? And I’m happy to report that that is not where she ended in her career search. She’s a nurse today, but with this assessment, it really can show show especially students opportunities that they might not even be familiar with. The data is so compelling Brandon. It shows that across the country, and it’s true in our community as well, that students think they want to be one of three things. They’re going to be a teacher or a police officer or firefighter, something in that realm, or in the medical field that they’re going to be a nurse, it’s what they know, it’s what they’ve experienced. But what the data shows is that aptitude for those three things very low, and where the aptitude is high is in it amongst other areas, that’s where we see the greatest discrepancy. These students have grown up with technology. They have great aptitude to do things in the information, information technology realm, but they have very little interest because they don’t even know what those careers could look like. So for the chamber, excuse me, what we’re doing is, number one, we’re providing this assessment free of charge to whoever wants to take it. Our goal this year was to have 100 students take this assessment. We’ve had over 1000 take this assessment in the first year. It’s but the magic is in the so what now? What you’ve got these results now what the reason why it makes sense for the chamber to lean into this space is that we can be the bridge now from these education realms to the workforce, and so we can take these students and say, okay, you’ve got results that say you’d be you have strong aptitude for logistics. What in the world does that mean? We can take you now into the workforce and show you logistics, careers and in the various ways that those aptitudes might show up in the workforce, and help walk them down that path. So it can be everything from job shadows, hands on, learning experiences, internships, apprenticeships that we’re able to line up for them based not on their interests, but more on their aptitude. I’m a strong believer that you can’t be what you can’t see. And if we can help kids see a path forward, that they have a strong aptitude in that there is a demand for in our community, that there’s employers that have those jobs available right here in West Michigan, all of a sudden, there’s a there’s a path forward for them, and a future that might look significantly different than what it would have looked like otherwise. Yeah, and we’ve
Brandon Burton 27:54
talked about this a lot on the podcast over the years, that when it comes to workforce readiness, a lot of these students at a high school, they, like you, talked about, you know, doctors, teachers, police or fire. Aside from what they see their parents do for a living, those are the other visual things that they see throughout their community. I can see myself doing that. And as far as what their parents do, either they fall in line and say, Yeah, I’ll continue on the family business, or do what my dad did, or or the exact opposite, like, I want nothing to do with what my parents did, because I saw, you know, whatever the side effect was, but leaning into the aptitude, which really it’s a word that I think most high school students don’t even think about. Like, now interests like, yeah, they can all understand what that means, but talk to us a little bit more about the aptitude. So in trying to relate this to high school students, how would you define aptitude for them?
Jodi Owczarski 28:57
Right? It’s how you’re uniquely wired. How does your brain work? This test is not one that you can see what they’re trying to get you to do, and can skew your results. I took the assessment. It was fascinating. The results that came out, and
Brandon Burton 29:14
they making a career change on us
Jodi Owczarski 29:16
to be a CEO. I was like, but it was, it was, it was really interesting to see how that works. What we talk about is that most people go through life related to your dominant hand, right? I’m right handed. I write very easily with my right hand. That’s where my aptitudes lie, right? It’s how my brain is wired. Can I go through life writing with my left hand absolutely but it’s going to be messy. I’m going to have to think a lot harder about it, right, and it’s going to take a lot more effort for me to do writing with my right hand is just so natural for me. Working within a career that aligns with your aptitudes is just like writing with your dominant. Hands. It’s natural.
Brandon Burton 30:02
Yeah, I love that definition. That’s awesome. And for whatever reason, it seems like it hasn’t been until just the last few years that chambers are starting to recognize this need to help bridge the gap with these high school students entering the workforce. It’s like school the school system does well getting them to a certain point, and then it’s like, well, now figure it out. You know, you’re gonna go to college and go to a trade school. Are you gonna enter the workforce? Good luck, you know. And for a chamber to step in and help, you know, guide what that next step could be is so valuable.
Jodi Owczarski 30:35
We can be that natural connector right between those two teachers are taxed with doing so much. And frankly, they’ve been in school their whole life, right? They grew up going to school. They went to school to go to school, and now they go to school every day to teach. And so it’s hard for them to always have full visibility into what’s really needed in the workforce of today. And so if we can help come alongside them to create those opportunities, to curate that and to show those students and the educators, frankly, what that looks like. I think it’s it’s better for all of us. So for the chamber, the the chamber Career Center for us, is both a book of work that we’re doing, but it’s also physical space. We’ve literally sold our building that we’ve called home, and are moving into a brand new space that we can configure in a way that will allow us to have a physical Career Center for students in young professionals, to be able to come to as a resource and an area of support, to walk alongside them through this journey, whether they’re in high school, whether they’re in college, or maybe they went to college for a month and was like, This is not for me. Who’s there to help these people right? Because they no longer have a high school guidance counselor or College Career Center, the chamber is that spot that is available to all within our community, regardless of where you’re at in that process.
Brandon Burton 32:04
Yeah, I love that perspective. Well, Jodi, as we begin to wrap things up, I wanted to ask for listeners who want to take their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item would you suggest or offer to them towards accomplishing that goal.
Jodi Owczarski 32:21
Sure you know, I can share Brandon, what helped us. You referenced already that we run on Eos, the Entrepreneurial Operating System and and part of that process has us in very regular strategic planning sessions, the first one that we went through when I moved into the CEO seat, the the process was evaluated. Evaluating our core values, and we decided to change one of those core values, from Think Big be great, to be a trailblazer to us. That means that we have an innovative mindset that drives positive impact. We can’t do anything. We can’t continue to do what we’ve always done, if we’re going to be innovative, if we’re going to be impactful, if we’re going to do big things that impact our community, we have to always be looking through that lens of what do we need to do new now to better serve our community? That’s been a big change in that mindset for us, and that’s changed everything. Everything’s on the table for us. Nothing is sacred, because we know we always have to continue to evolve at the speed of business to be able to stay ahead of what our members need.
Brandon Burton 33:34
Yeah, I love that. As we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Jodi Owczarski 33:43
Such a great question. You know, if you haven’t had the opportunity to look at the new horizon initiatives, 2035, that came out, there’s a ton of great information about where we’re going as an industry. There’s a couple of pieces in there that really stick out to me that might be most relevant for this conversation. First is chamber serving as unifiers. It’s it’s not surprising that we’re in a time of incredible political and social fragmentation. The Chamber now is needed more than ever to be the unifier as they leave the community, we’ve got to be collaborative and strategic, no matter what the issue is. If we take that lens, being the unifier, being collaborative, being strategic, that will be critical. The second one is catalytic leadership. You know, our communities are looking to us to be bold and to proactively instigate change that benefits our community. We’ve got to take that lens, be catalytic, be trailblazing in the mindset we bring to this work for our organization, a part of Eos is setting your 10 year target. Where are you going? What do you want to accomplish? And for us, our 10 year target does. Not even use the words Chamber of Commerce. Our industry is changing so quickly that I don’t know if we’ll still even be called a Chamber of Commerce in 10 years. So when we set our 10 year target, we said that we want to be a trailblazing organization that turns ripples of influence into tidal waves of positive impact for our community. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but if we’re accomplishing that, then I think we’re doing the right things.
Brandon Burton 35:28
Yes, I love that the ripples of influence into tidal waves of positive impact. And I think that could be a tagline that most chambers could pick up and run with and adopt. You know, just like community impact day.
Jodi Owczarski 35:41
Yeah, welcome to it rip off and duplicate. Yeah, that’s right.
Brandon Burton 35:47
I love it. Well. Jodi, for those listening, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information if they wanted to reach out and connect with you and learn more about community impact day or chamber Career Center. Anything else you guys are doing there at the Michigan West Coast chamber, where would you point them to reach out and connect?
Jodi Owczarski 36:06
You know, our website is a great place to start. WestCoastChamber.org, all of our teams contact. Different information is on the website, but please email me directly. I love to chat chat with my chamber peers, and happy to share the secret sauce recipes for anything we have. And I will likely ask you for your secret sauce as well. My email is jodi@westcoastchamber.org.
Brandon Burton 36:37
Very good. Well, be sure to get it in our show notes to make it nice and easy, but this has been a fun conversation. It’s been great to have you back on the show and and feel like we’re good friends. Now. You know, I love it so much so, but I wish you and your team Best of luck this year is chamber of the year and into another great, positive community, community impact day next year as well. So look forward to hearing how that goes
Jodi Owczarski 37:03
wonderful. Brandon, I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you so much. If
Brandon Burton 37:07
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