Leadership in a Crisis with David Brown

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability and to correct obvious transcription errors while preserving the meaning of the original conversation.

Episode 71 — Leadership in a Crisis with David Brown
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: David Brown
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.204 Brandon Burton
Hey there, just real quick before we get into this episode, this is Brandon and I just wanted to share a quick message. If you are listening to this, chances are good that you are a chamber professional. And guaranteed if you're listening to this, you also listen to podcasts. Have you considered creating a podcast for your chamber and all the benefits that that can bring? Check out my free chamber podcasting guide at chamberchatpodcast.com slash podcasting. To learn how you can get started with your own chamber podcast. This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community. And now your host, he believes we all have something that we can learn from each other. He's my dad, Brandon Burton. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. This is your host, Brandon Burton, and you're joining us today for episode seventy-one. And our guest today is David Brown, who's the president and CEO of the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce. Which is one of the largest and most highly accredited chambers in the nation, and the ACCE's 2015 Chamber of the Year. With a five-star accreditation by the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Greater Omaha Chamber is in the top 1% of chambers nationally. Backed by more than 30 years of experience in economic development and chamber administration, David serves the chamber mission to Champion thriving business community and a prosperous region with bold vision, comprehensive understanding, and contagious contagious enthusiasm. He, his chamber staff, and volunteers work in earnest on behalf of more than 3,000 member businesses, encouraging their success by advocating for a strong business climate, creating opportunities for member visibility and business connections, pursuing investment and jobs for the region.
02:12.64 Brandon Burton
Strengthening leaders and the community and enhancing the region's brand and image. Under David's steady leadership, the Greater Omaha Economic Development Partnership has successfully landed more than 860 projects, representing nearly forty-two thousand jobs and more than eleven billion dollars in capital investment since two thousand four. David began his career in organizational leadership in Michigan in nineteen eighty-three. as president of Monroe County Industrial Development Corporation and Director of the Port of Monroe. He served ten years in Indiana as a Greater Fort Wayne Chamber of Commerce, first as Vice President of Economic Development and then as president. His next assignment took him to South Carolina, where he was president and CEO of the Greater Greenville Chamber of Commerce. David assumed his current role as president and CEO of the Greater Omaha Chamber in October 2003. David is a graduate of Dartmouth College where he majored in geography with a minor in environmental studies. There he played on the 1978 Ivy League Championship football team and was a recipient of the Earl P. Hamilton Award. He has completed courses at the National Development Council, the American Management Association. Bell Leadership Academy and Gallup University. In addition to his professional responsibilities, David contributes his time and expertise to numerous community service organizations, including the Aksarben Future Trust, Boy Scouts of America, College World Series of Omaha, Governor's International Trade Council, Greater Omaha Alliance for Business Ethics, Opera Omaha, the University of Nebraska Omaha Entrepreneurship. Advisory board, United Way of the Midlands, and the U.S. Strategic Command Consultation Committee. Nationally, David serves on the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives Board and is currently serving as its chairman. He is also a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Committee of 100. David and his wife Maggie have been married for 38 years and have two sons, Gregory and Elijah.
04:35.672 Brandon Burton
Today as we have David with us here on Chamber Chat Podcast, we we're recording this episode at the towards the end of April of 2020. And the focus for our discussion today will be around leadership in a crisis. And we will jump into this discussion with David as soon as we get back from hearing from our sponsor.
05:01.72 Brandon Burton
During this time of uncertainty, most chambers are looking for ways to replace funding from events and programs that either been canceled or postponed due to social distancing that does not allow for us to meet as large groups. Another topic that is top of mind for chambers is how to help their member businesses recover from the financial impact their businesses experienced. With these considerations in mind, I want to introduce you to Swipe It. Swipe It offers a credit card processing affinity program for Chambers of Commerce that can help answer your questions about how to replace some of your lost revenue while also allowing for you to serve as an advocate to your member businesses by introducing them to a resource that can save them money on their credit card processing fees so they can become more profitable. Swipe It has been a supporter of Chamber Chat Podcasts from the beginning. And they are the best in the credit card processing business. Visit Chamberchatpodcast.com slash CC, which stands for credit card, to learn how you can get swiping with Swipe It. All right, David, we are back. Thank you for joining us today on Chamber Chat Podcast. If you would just please take a moment and say hello to the audience and share something interesting about yourself that I might not have shared as I as I read through your bio.
06:30.522 David Brown
Good morning folks. I hope everybody is safe and well this end of April twenty twenty. and we have been, as you have been, dealing with this coronavirus challenge and we are right in the middle of that right now. So I hope you're all doing well. something interesting about me. Well my my wife and I as Brandon said have two sons. one's a movie maker and one's an opera singer. So I'm not quite sure how to help those folks, but expect a chamber guy to have a couple of artsy folks like that as my my kids, but they're both very happy and we're real proud of them. So we can watch movies and hear opera just about any time of the day we want to.
07:13.87 Brandon Burton
That's right. That's awesome. It it's neat neat background though, and fun to to have sons in the entertainment and arts industry. That's great. can you please just share with us a little bit about the Greater Omaha Chamber, just so we can all gain a little more perspective where you're coming from as we dive into this topic today.
07:33.934 David Brown
Sure. So the Greater Omaha Chamber has been around 126 years. We have about 2900 members, give or take a nickel or two. We do both economic development and the chamber business for a eight county region. So we're one of those about 25% of the chambers in the country that are responsible for the economic development agenda as well as the traditional chamber agenda. Our budget's right around ten million dollars a year. and while we are headquartered in downtown Omaha, we cover three counties in Iowa, right across the river, and five counties around us in Nebraska, particularly for accounts development, but also for some public policy work that we do where we end up having some some statewide impact. So it's an interesting opportunity to kind of watch the community grow, plan the community grow, and engage in really some catalytic efforts to make it a a better place. We're driven by a 2040 vision that we put together with the help of next generation consulting, Rebecca Ryan, back in 2017, where we really identified a new goal for the organization. and trying to make it a place that we knew would both accommodate the demographic shifts that we were seeing and make it the kind of place that we think Omaha really wants to be and deserves to be. So we reinvented really our work program and effort moving forward back in twenty seventeen and we've been working towards implementing that twenty forty strategy ever since.
09:16.01 Brandon Burton
All right. So I can't imagine as you guys did your twenty forty vision that you probably didn't envision this COVID nineteen pandemic in the midst of all this, right? No.
09:27.096 David Brown
No, really couldn't, although we tried to identify disruptions that could both move us forward as a region, but also might derail some of our efforts. I don't think that a pandemic was in any of the multitude of scenarios that we ran. But we we did know that there were some things that could happen that would really slow things down and most of those had to do with an interruption in commerce. what happened if the economy tanked, what happened if there was another recession, what happened if a major employer might have left, and how do we have to respond to those things? So while I would be a hundred percent lying to you if I said we had predicted a pandemic like this, we did at least know that what kind of an impact we thought might happen if there was a significant economic challenge that we had to face.
10:23.498 Brandon Burton
So and I think that's helpful. You had mentioned having that kind of vision or anticipating a possible interrupt interruption in commerce. And I'm sure that's helpful as far as positioning yourself as a leader in the community to be able to know how to respond by kind of anticipating that that is a possibility at some point. So when we talk about kind of leadership in crisis, it first of all I think it helps. to be in a good position as a leader before the crisis you know comes about. So maybe you can talk a little bit about that, about how to position yourself as a leader. it may be a little bit too late for some right now, but to be able to be prepared for the future and then maybe we could talk about kind of managing through and then looking forward with leadership through a crisis.
11:16.398 David Brown
Sure. So I think if you read any of the ACCE work that ACCE has put out really since the Horizons initiative was run a few years ago, a lot of what that document talked about was the role that a chamber exec can play in a community going forward. And you have really have some choices to make as a chamber. I mean, what role does the chamber want to play? in that community, we think that with the political fracturing that is going on in the the world and in our country and in the with the discussion that seems to happen all across the the the country in urban rural issues, partisan issues, demographic issues, can you craft a place sort of in the middle of all of that discussion that puts your organization in a A place where you are the counted on source of objective information where your members can rally around the information that you provide. And can you act as a convener and a collaborator in your community so that people are used to the chamber bringing people in to have broad discussions on topics that impact the community, not just the business community? And if you're like us and you do economic development on a regional basis, can you also then engage the region in conversations about growth and what are the issues that that need to be addressed in order to make sure that that growth occurs? So for for a lot of chamber execs and for a lot of chambers, I think there's a a need to figure out if your chamber can be one of those that is in the community building phase. Can you move people into a discussion about what the community ought look like. And if you can do that, then you've got to have a path forward where you can show people what those important issues are that need to be addressed moving forward. So I think part of that catalytic leadership piece is that you want to cause change to happen. And you want to cause change to happen that'll be positive change and you want to bring people along with you so that it's not a one person parade. You've actually got people following or engaging along.
13:38.486 David Brown
In that process. So for us, when we did the 2040 process, it actually gave us a whole new target. I mean, if you think about what chambers tend to do, you know, we will sort of like building a multi-layer cake, right? So for the last five years we got this much done. And then for the next five years, we're gonna get this much done, and then we're gonna get this much done. And pretty soon it's about the numbers, the capital investment or jobs, or members, or number of people that showed up at our events, et cetera. But it really hasn't moved. anything the organization or the community in any direction. Basically you just add it on top of it with the amount of successes that that that you've had. But what if you could identify a place where you want your community to go? And then what are the things that'll keep your your community from accomplishing those things? It was a new process for us to be thinking forward about what we wanted to be instead of planning sort of from the back, meaning You go back and assess the last five years and you figure out what you got done, what worked and what didn't work. You eliminate the stuff that didn't. You had five percent on the front side to make sure you're hitting some trends, figure out a way to pay for it and you move forward for five more years. For us, we wanted to be in the business of actually going towards a t target and saying if this is what we want want Omaha to be, then what steps do we have to take now to start taking steps towards that Omaha twenty forty plan in the future? And I think You know, chambers have that opportunity in front of them right now to figure out once we make our way through this current crisis, coming out the other side, you've got an opportunity to figure out what kind of a community you want to be moving forward. And so had you been involved in some of that leadership engagement ahead of time, or you're used to convening people, they're used to having you convene them, then during this time of crisis, it's even easier to be perceived as that convener. And where you can start having conversations about recovery and then also having conversations about what the world will look like when you come out the other end.
15:41.312 Brandon Burton
I love it. As you were giving that explanation, what stood out to me is as a chamber you want to position yourself to be that go to resource for your community. And that really that leadership in the community is is based around having a forward looking vision and to to be that catalyst for some positive change in the community.
16:01.4 David Brown
No, Brandon, I would add to that that we had we asked the Urban League of the Midlands and the United Way of the Midlands to partner with us as sponsoring the 2040 vision. And that's important because now their audiences were more comfortable with coming to the chamber with issues on the table as well. So we entered this crisis phase with an expectation that the chamber was going to be speaking with. social service organizations, government organizations, arts organizations. and that we were all going to be having this conversation together. It wasn't something that we had to kind of manufacture at the last minute. So I always constantly say that we always accomplish more together. And I think that's a a key byline of any kind of a leader is that you are able to speak to folks across a whole bunch of different walks of life and that there's enough trust at least that if you bring people together that it's going to be something that's really productive for everybody around the table.
16:59.966 Brandon Burton
Absolutely. I love those points. Now, as we are in the the midst of this crisis right now, this COVID nineteen pandemic, how have you seen some of these leadership attributes kind of shifting, maybe shift shift your focus a little bit there at the chamber? But how are you seeing that translate from kind of your good solid base of leadership to kind of crisis management with leadership?
17:26.978 David Brown
Well, you know, I would say two things have happened. One, you know, we have a an internal culture of the organization that we work really very, very hard to sustain. And we started building it back in about two thousand four or five and we worked very hard on creating this and creating this neighbor. And you know, you know, it's it's really important we're able to continue engaging the process of working on my internal culture. Because in the midst of all of this crisis, having a team that is able and willing to respond to things is really important. And so being able to get your team moving in the right direction, even when really they're worried about their lives, they're worried about the lives of their their loved ones. they're worried about whether or not they're going to have jobs at the other end, building a core inside your company that can withstand this kind of pressure and crisis is really important. And then what we have found is that while our focus narrowed appreciably down to okay, how how can we give enough information to our companies so they can make good informed choices? what information do we need to get from healthcare providers so that we can provide really good information to our members as they start making decisions about when they can reopen and when can't they reopen? what what materials we have to have on hand at the end, what business planning do we have to do now so that companies have access to materials that they're going to need to reopen and they have access to the information they need to kind of go through an orderly reopening process. So you know we've we've worked with people ever since this crisis started to think about what comes out at the other end. And I think the decisions were made for us about what the when we were going to close, when we were, when the environment was going to be such that know the government said we have to protect everybody and so you can't gather in large groups and you you you can't the restaurants can't open all those things if that happened and then how that impacted the rest of our members. And then it was inc incumbent upon us really then to respond to that and go from a very narrow agenda of how do I make sure my members are able to do what they need to do to eventually broadening it to what's recovery look like and how do I provide enough information to my members in the community that recovery can happen seamlessly.
19:55.786 David Brown
and that we can make a difference in moving the community forward as quickly as we can. So I think from a crisis management perspective, you really gotta worry about a couple of things as a leader. One of those is just always portraying calmness. We've all seen the commercial, don't don't ever let them see them see you sweat. I think that really applies here. I mean, a a strong leader in this mix has got to be able to at least reflect calmness and purpose. and goals and process, even if on the inside, you know, we're churning and wondering what's what's going to happen next. I think number one, you gotta focus on your people and make sure your people know that they're the center of your focus. And then eventually start focusing on your members and the companies in that market, and then eventually on the rest of the community. So there's a a staging of of goals I think that you've got to put in place that They they might change every day, but ultimately you've got to do this scenario planning of what happens next, and then what happens next, and then what happens next. And are they happening in a way that you have to be able to predict with some some level of certainty what happens in a worst case scenario, what happens in kind of a mid-case scenario, and what happens in a good case scenario. And then be able to communicate that to your board leadership so they understand that you're doing all the planning that you need to do to kind of come out the other end as whole as you can.
21:20.906 Brandon Burton
I think that's a key point to keep that calmness and and also to be able to keep a pulse on what you how your staff is reacting, what your members, how they're feeling, what they're you know, what they're facing, and then your general community as well. without having that pulse and that feedback, it's hard to know how to manage going forward.
21:43.0 David Brown
Yeah. Well, I think we've all spent a whole lot of time on doing video chats, conference calls, all those things. And the vast majority of my time is just spent reaching out to people who can give me more information, who want information from me, who can give me information as well, so we can communicate despite the fact that I can't get in the same room with people and lead the way I normally let. It'd be about persuasiveness and about just getting in the same room with people. You know, now you can have the same screen with people. And you're supposed to be able to figure out a way to lead in in that way. So it's a very, very different process, but in the end, it's still about communicating with people as often and as effectively as you can and being attentive upon the goal of each of those conversations and trying to make sure that the other person's getting something out of that conversation just like you are.
22:31.628 Brandon Burton
So have you have you learned anything through trying to lead through a screen that is different than doing it in person?
22:40.354 David Brown
You know, I I have realized a couple of things. It's been a lot easier to get on people's calendars since they're not flying around the world. So it's it's more likely to actually get a meeting scheduled via video chat in some cases than it is a person to person meeting. And and I think we will take that to heart as we move beyond this scenario into recovery and reopening that this will probably be with us for a while, that from a scheduling perspective. If nothing else, you save the travel time between you and the appointment and back, or your appointment in their office and back. And that saving of time I think is gonna be with us for a long time to come. So I have learned that piece that you can actually get on people's calendars. you know, I I I think I've learned that some people fit in this model really well. They take to this change famously. Others not so much. No, I get it. It's a little bit different. We got kids at home. We got sometimes both spouses working from home. And so it's it's a difficult environment. but we're gonna spend some time thinking about which of our functions at the chamber really need to have square footage at the office all the time. How much of it can be done remotely. and then we're gonna apply that same question to everything that we do across all of our contacts, to economic development clients, to elect officials to even talking with our our staff that might be around the around the country different places. How do we do things because it can be a savings to the budget and in some cases more effective, efficient way to communicate.
24:21.878 Brandon Burton
Absolutely. I think there's definitely some some blessings and some lessons to be learned as we go through this to be able to to plan moving forward to be more efficient. as we do look, you know, moving forward, you've kind of shed some light onto some things that that you're thinking about moving forward. is there anything in your plans as you know, leadership wise that that you're planning on doing as you try to lead your organization? your staff, your your members and your community through this recovery.
24:55.084 David Brown
Yeah, I I think some of it are some new habits. So I mean I I communicate with my team now as a whole team three or four times a week. there's a an email goes out or a text goes out, but somehow or another I'm communicating to our employees three or four times a week with a message from me that talks about my experience and hopefully relates to their experience. And you know, I I used to discount the time I'd spend wandering around the building just talking to people. And I realized that I'm I miss that, number one. But I also think I would miss getting a message to my people on a pretty regular basis. So I think I'm going to continue that email piece that kind of gives people sort of a behind the scenes look at what DGB thinks and how things are affecting my life and how I know that they're affecting theirs. asking some pointed questions about How people are engaging, or are there some challenges that we need to help fix? So I think that communication with my staff is something I will definitely carry away and something that I've learned here that I might have discounted before. I also communicate a lot more with my membership via the written word during this process. I'm at least every week I send out a message to our board letting them know what's going on. And now I also do the same thing with our membership in a weekly newsletter. that you know, I might I might have done that once a quarter or so before, but I think we're finding that that's something the members want us to do. and so I'm gonna be communicating with the folks outside via the written word, probably more than I did before. you know, and and finally I think as I mentioned earlier, this this webinar kind of world that we are in now is gonna be with us for a while. And I think we need to become really adept at producing webinars with really strong content that goes through the chamber and the chamber can continue to be branded as the organization that provides people with really good substantive data and information and trend information as well as how-to information that they may not get may not have gotten from us in the past or couldn't get from another source.
27:14.264 Brandon Burton
So I think as we've been going through this pandemic, I I've seen a lot of chambers doing a great job kind of bringing attention to maybe local retailers that are trying to keep their business operating one way or another. restaurants, especially with takeout and curbside pickup and everything. And and I kind of see that as the the low hanging fruit, if you will. If you watch the news, everybody's worried about, you know, what the restaurants are gonna do because people like to go out and eat, right?
27:43.518 David Brown
All right.
27:43.906 Brandon Burton
So based on the feedback that you're getting from your members and the interactions you're getting, is there anything that you're coming across that might be helpful or useful for other chamber leaders that are listening? maybe outside of the the restaurant and, you know, small main street retail businesses to help with the recovery?
28:05.506 David Brown
You know, I I have. we have an interesting kind of a bifurcation here that about ninety percent of our members have, you know, fewer than fifty employees. and the other ten percent of course tend to be be larger businesses. but it's interesting that all of them are asking for the same thing. they want to know how are we going to be successful moving forward? And what direction should we be heading? What changes do we need to make that were maybe not apparent before we went into this recovery process, but now it's it's abundantly clear that we had some some weaknesses that we need to shore up. and how do we make sure that those don't become problems for us again? So if you surround yourself with a collection of leaders from your community, I I happen to have probably Four or five meetings a week now with the a combination of folks from the arts, from the public schools, from the United Way, from the foundations, just trying to figure out what all the issues everyone is is dealing with. and those conversations used to happen sort of one one off. So I would talk to one person and then talk to another person. This this there's the need for your members to really know. where the agenda's going once we get out of this. We've all learned something about our communities in this, whether you're where you're strong, where you're not, where your relationships are weaker, where your relationships are stronger. And I'm I'm going to make a gross assumption that we all know which restaurants need help and which bars need help and which retailers need help. And we need to do everything we can to help those independent businesses do well as fast as they can because we're a economy based on commerce. And we need to be able to show How that commerce can happen and happen quickly. But there's some fundamental, I'm gonna call them community infrastructure things that I think chambers are uniquely capable of dealing with. That doesn't mean we solve them ourselves, but we're able to bring other leaders together and get our arms wrapped around this these problems that have come up because we don't want them to come up again if there's any kind of a challenge in the community. So
30:26.358 David Brown
I think this is a golden opportunity for chambers to lead the conversation on so what worked and what didn't work and what fundamental parts of our systems here in our community work the way we wanted them to, and which ones do we really need to shore up? And then how do we make sure we provide resources to that before people forget that we had this problem and the resources start going other places? So I I think this is a golden opportunity for chamber execs. To be the convener of conversations about what worked and what didn't. And if it didn't work, why didn't it? And how do we make sure that those resources need to be applied in the in the appropriate way? Let me let me give you an example. We all assume that schools are gonna go back to e learning, and we all assume that every business is gonna be able to do this this kind of a of a video chat or a some kind of a podcast. But then we found out that not everybody had equal access to technology or equal access to Wi-Fi or broadband or just fill in the blank of what it took just to have this technology in place. Well that that's an infrastructure gap that needs to be dealt with if there were gaps in your community, because it's just unevenly distributed. So what can a chamber do about that? You can convene a meeting of the community and figure out a way to make sure that that gap is addressed as one of your top priorities. And there's all kinds of upside to doing that, and there's very little downside to doing that. So identifying those things that worked really well and patting yourselves to the back and make sure that stuff continues. But the stuff that didn't work so well is the place where the chamber can really engage in being that kind of a convener and that kind of a catalytic leader to make sure that plans are put in place to make sure that that problem didn't have.
32:16.65 Brandon Burton
I I love that example of this being you know, an opportunity to see these the the problems. You know, like the like you said, the infrastructure gap. There's there's a way to solve that. And as you convene the the leaders of the community around that, it can be solved. And I totally agree. This is a golden opportunity for chambers throughout the country to really lead, to convene and lead in their community and to be that source that everyone looks to to to see their way through. Yeah, as we start Kind of wrapping things up with with our discussion here, I wanted to ask, based on our discussion today, what might be one tip that you would offer to the chamber professionals listening to help take their chamber up to the next level?
33:03.096 David Brown
So for smaller chambers, the tendency is I think to think most about the members as you mentioned earlier, Brandon, on Main Street. The ones you walk up and down the street every day and you can see if they're doing well or not doing well. and to focus all the attention on your members. And I understand that 'cause we're membership organizations. But I would suggest that there's a That model of only being a merchant's association or only being a downtown association has severe revenue challenges that come along with it. Because those are truly then discretionary expenses for somebody to say, well, I can forego the chamber promoting me for a year if I can't afford the membership. But what if Every chamber exec in the country start thinking about the strategic role that they can play moving forward. And if if you get to a point where people are joining you because of your influence and because of your community-building mission, and because of your ability to help them maybe be more profitable because you've got a pretty aggressive public policy agenda, you don't have to be a huge chamber to do that. You can be a one-person chamber and still engage in a an orientation where you're accomplishing a mission for your members in the community in addition to supporting them as merchants or as businesses. So I would challenge all the chamber execs there to think about your role as a leader in your community. How do you play the role of convener? How do you think about building a mission-oriented membership with your members rather than a transactional one. If you can get away from merely transaction, you'll find some long term members that'll engage and potentially invest in you in ways you never thought of before because they want to see something bigger happen than maybe what you're able to get engaged in the f in the
35:17.606 Brandon Burton
Good advice. Go mission based rather than transaction based for sure. So I asked this question to everyone that I have on the podcast. I like to, as we all try to look in our crystal balls into the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the purpose of chambers moving forward?
35:37.656 David Brown
Well, in large measure I see chambers, if they don't move to a mission based environment, I I I unfortunately don't see a real rosy future for them. I think there's there's so many other ways that members can get the kind of support that they want from us on a transactional basis, that w we we may end up getting to a point where we are irrelevant to moving forward. So I I think no matter how big or small your chamber is, if you're not engaged in making the community better, there'll there will come a time when someone's gonna make a choice about whether or not they wanna write the dues check to you. And you know, frankly, the time is perfect for this. I mean, we are in the midst of a crisis like the world has never seen. And if we are the ones that are perceived as leaders, we will become magnets for more people that want to engage with our organizations. So if we can play that strategic role, that leadership role, I think it's gonna have a a big impact on chambers moving forward. So I see chambers of all sizes and types eventually moving towards a more mission focused on their community because the business community needs to be at the table for those conversations and the chambers the logical place for businesses to engage.
36:59.894 Brandon Burton
Perfect. I think you've shared a lot of great ideas and and some strategies with us today. And I wanted to give you an opportunity, if there's listeners out there that wanted to connect with you or maybe continue this discussion offline, follow up on th something you may have said, what might be the best way for someone to to reach out and and connect with you?
37:22.446 David Brown
Well I'll give you two ways to do that. my email address is dbrown at omahachamber dot org. I'm the only one that reads it, so you can send it to me and I'll be sh certain to get it. I'll be happy to to listen to you if you have a more emergency need or a more urgent need, I should say, and you want to talk, my mobile number is four two six one six four one seven five and I'd be happy to talk to anybody.
37:52.078 Brandon Burton
That's great. I appreciate that. We will get your contact information on the show notes page for this episode as well. So if somebody's out walking their dog while they're listening or probably not driving a car, hopefully it is this is early June. Hopefully they're out driving their car somewhere and going to do some commerce. But that show notes page will be found at chamber chat podcast dot com slash episode seventy one. And David again, and thank you so much for spending time with us today and sharing your leadership with us. I appreciate it.
38:24.364 David Brown
I appreciate the opportunity, Brandon. Take care if you say
38:28.63 Brandon Burton
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