A Podcast for Chamber Professionals Posts

Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Doug Griffiths. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.

Feel free to join our Chamber Chat Champions Facebook Group to discuss this episode and to share your own experiences and tips with other Chamber Champions.

Introduction

Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

And now, your host she believes that there are a couple favorite ways to call community. Here’s my dad Brandon Burton.

Hello, Chamber Champions. Thank you for joining us today on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Diann Rogers, President and CEO of the Rancho Cordova Area Chamber to learn how the Holman Brothers has provided value for her.

Diann Rogers 0:47
As a medium sized chamber, we recognize that it’s absolutely critical to have a well qualified and well trained membership development person, home and brothers trained that person recruited that person then they even trained me on how to manage that person. We’re grateful for the support we got.

Brandon Burton 1:01
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting HolmanBros.com.

Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Doug Griffiths. Doug, you may recognize as being the author of 13 Ways to Kill Your Community. Doug grew up on a ranch outside of a small community, where that contributed to practical education for him giving a strong work ethic and critical thinking skills. Education, whether he’s learning or teaching has always been an important aspect of his life. After teaching and ranching for several years, Doug successfully served as an elected member of the Legislative Assembly in the province of Alberta for four consecutive terms. In that time, he served in two senior cabinet portfolios as Minister of Municipal Affairs, and Minister of service Alberta, as well as three junior positions in agriculture, finance and Solicitor General. Doug retired from politics in January 2015. to actively pursue his passion of helping communities, organizations and businesses grow stronger in his best selling book 13 Ways to Kill Your Community. Doug identifies challenges and opportunities that all our communities face. The lessons that come from those stories are applicable to all types of communities, whether they’re towns, organizations or businesses. His talents include seeing through the lies, we tell ourselves, overcoming bad attitudes, targeting and focusing tactical planning, communicating with those who are afraid to change and building enduring prosperity for communities. His passion lies and building strong communities. Because within strong communities, leadership can succeed, businesses can prosper and families can find great quality of life.

Doug, I am super excited to have you with me today on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.

Doug Griffiths 3:05
Oh, Brandon, thank you, I am really excited to be on the Chamber Chat Podcast. And I appreciate the invitation. Especially when I get the chance to talk about how valuable and important the role the chambers are going to play in, in moving communities through the past, into the present, and then into the future, it’s going to be so critically instrumental in ensuring the success of communities and I fundamentally believe that building communities is single most important job on earth because as soon as communities are, are successful and prosperous, then families will be able to take care of each other and take care of themselves. So I’m really excited to be here. Something interesting about me, I I don’t know if there’s anything that you haven’t said already, except I will add one thing I was in provincial politics for 13 years for four terms, I resigned on purpose to go back to community building, which is is how I wound up in politics. I tell everybody, if you want in politics, just just keep talking. And if you want out of politics, just just keep talking, talking. Yeah. But you know what, I have been through rehab, I am fully recovered. So I’m I’m good. I’m pretty, pretty blunt and pretty focused on community building. So I’m glad to be here.

Brandon Burton 4:22
Well, I have a 16 year old son who would love to get into politics, I’m going to have to share that advice with him because he just keeps talking all the time. It’s like it’s going to get you in trouble or it’s going to get you somewhere one or the other. Or both or both. Yeah. So I shared a little bit in your bio, but tell us what you do with 13 Ways what kind of services you offer as a company and organization what what is your mission and goal that you hereafter?

About 13 Ways

Doug Griffiths 4:49
Yeah, it’s um, it’s kind of funny because it’s expanded. I mean, when I resigned from politics and the second edition I had finished just after That and released it. And it’s a national bestseller in the US and in Canada. Granted, we need about a 10th of the number of sales to be a best seller here. But it’s people ask me to come and speak and to do the 13 Ways presentation. And so I’ve been all over North America Speaking and then people would call me up after and say, so help us what, what do we do now. And so I would offer up some advice on you know, what I think strategic planning should look like, focusing more on strategy than on operations, because so many strategic plans are generic and watered down, and they’re about operations and there’s no strategy whatsoever in them. So we, we, I brought along a couple of people and our team has grown to five and we have specialists in economic development and chamber issues and communication in modernizing main streets with with designs and socialization in website design, and, and social media and traditional marketing strategies. And we’ve just grown into a pretty exceptional team. And so we, we tend to go into communities and, and assess what their real strengths are, they often think that, you know, what they think are their strengths sometimes aren’t and what they think are their weaknesses can actually become strengths. And then we, we engage people in the community, you know, a lot of public engagement people, you know, gather opinions, but you know, people are busy with their day to day lives. And oftentimes, it’s the the tyranny of the urgent the issue right in front of them they want addressed, and that’s not about what’s what you need to do to be successful 10 years from now. So we plant seeds with people to with new ideas, then we do a strategic plan. And then we do the marketing and communication strategy focused on, on helping people in the community get excited about their potential and, and crafting a real marketing strategy. So they don’t get lost in all the noise and new design websites. And so we sort of do the gamut from, we need help all the way through to we’re, we’re ready to take that first step and actually bring people in.

Brandon Burton 7:00
Awesome. And I think there’s so much value to bring in that perspective from somebody outside of your community, to be able to say, here’s your strengths and weaknesses, and I relate it back to some of the greatest athletes, you know, the Michael Jordan’s and Tiger Woods of the world. They all had coaches, right. I mean, they were the best of the best, but they had they still had coaches who could bring a different perspective and help them see those blind spots are the weaknesses and strengths to help exploit. So I think that’s so key.

Doug Griffiths 7:29
We often get called Community coaches or community therapists, because most consultants come in and they write a report and they leave and for our clients, we tell them once you’ve hired us, we never go away. We’re relentlessly going to advise you and, and give you strategies to make you successful. Because, you know, we we don’t just do this to make money. We do this because we believe in the cause we’ve we’ve adopted.

Brandon Burton 7:54
Yeah, for sure. Well, we’re going to talk more today about the 13 Ways to Kill Your Community. I know a lot of Chamber Champions are familiar with the book, but we’ll have some some more maybe deep dive conversation on that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Topic-13 Ways to Kill Your Community

All right, we are back. And as I mentioned before the break well, we’re talking about 13 Ways to Kill Your Community, your book. And recently, I was invited to join a 13 Ways to Kill Your Community for chambers Facebook page. And that’s how we got connected and kind of one thing led to another and now we’re here talking on the podcast. But um, and I’ll link to that Facebook group too. So if anybody wants to join in and and add their contributions to the discussions, it’s a great place. But what stood out to me as I started reading your book, is you start off with a story or I guess, I mean, it’s a real deal where where you address high school students, and have them kind of project themselves into the future. But you have kind of a unique twist on it. Do you want to share kind of that, that mindset and kind of set the stage for the discussion?

Doug Griffiths 11:22
Yeah, sure. I, we’ve actually had people say that one of the most valuable stories, because the 13 Ways to Kill Your Community, they say then isn’t about community building, it’s about the way we govern and manage our lives. And that’s, that’s where it was born from. So I was a, I was a junior high teacher, before its subs, I made enough money to subsidize my ranching habits, so I could buy more horses and cows. And I would go talk to high school students about how to be successful. And it was, it was a pretty straight up presentation, you know, so, you know, study hard, don’t do drugs, marry someone nice. It’s it’s pretty easy formula, and that the high school students would look at me go, I know, my parents told me that. And everybody’s told me that for for my entire life, I know how to do that. And so when I was done, they’d walk out and say, Thanks, that was wonderful. But nothing really changed. And then I walked into this classroom and had an epiphany right before I was going to do the presentation, instead of talking about how to be successful. I asked them to describe what it would look like, if they ruined their lives. If you failed, that they look down the road, they’re 40 years old, and they have absolutely ruin their lives. Describe it to me. And so their high school students, they would say things like, well, I’d, I’d be a drug addict, I’d write that on the board, I’d wind up in jail, I’d write that on the board, I would fail out of school. So I couldn’t take care of my family, I’d write that on the board, whatever they came up with, I put it on the board. And when they finished with compiling a really robust list, I’d say great, let’s pretend you want to do this. Any one of these things you want to ruin your life. How would you start today? So let’s say you want to be a drug addict? What would you do today to get down start on that path? And I mean, they’re high school students. So they’d hum and haw, and nobody would say anything until one person put up their hand and say, Well, if I wanted to become a drug addict, I’d, I’d smoke a joint after school, and two kids would turn red, because that’s what they did yesterday. And that, you know, they’d also debate well, but alcohol is worse than the marijuana and regardless, they, they started to realize what they were doing that day that would lead them down that path, because I guarantee you, not a single person has ever said, I want to become a drug addict, if you if you meet a drug addict, none of them say hey, this was my lifelong ambition. But somehow, we we get there, we wind up in jail, we wind up marrying somebody we’re not happy with, we wind up doing all sorts of things that ruin our lives. And and it’s because we don’t pay attention to what we’re doing. Now. We wind up trading away what we want most 20 years from now in our lives, for what we want. Now that’s pleasurable, easy and convenient. And it just, I tell that story, because then it struck me that I was working with communities and talking about how to be successful. And they’ll say, Yeah, we know. But they were doing things that were the opposite of what they needed to do to be successful.

Brandon Burton 14:10
Yeah, so that it really helps to apply that same kind of exercise to communities and say, if your goal is to kill your community, where do you start? And then you’ve got these 13 ways. So why don’t we run down real quick, what the 13 ways are, and I’m sure we’ll circle back to certain ones in our discussion, but that way, just to kind of set the table for the discussion what, what are the 13 ways how communities kill or how people kill their communities?

Doug Griffiths 14:39
Well, the number one is, is forget the water. I mean, water is so critical and fundamental to our success. And I’ve I have a lot of I mean, Alberta’s an oil and gas sort of jurisdiction and, and a lot of my former colleagues and I talk and they say, Oh, the economy runs on on oil, and the next World War will be fought over oil. It’s so funny. fundamental to our economy. And I always point out to them, the last World War will be fought over water, because whoever controls water controls everything. I mean, you know, my grandpa always reminded me, you, you can go for three minutes without air three days without water and three weeks without food. And then you die, you can do without just about everything else. But these are so fundamental. And yet we, we sometimes take for granted that we have clean water, or and we get upset when we don’t. And nobody shows up for you know, a ribbon cutting on a new sewer line or a new water line. everyone shows up for the new ribbon cutting on the football arena or, you know, but we don’t show up for those things that are so fundamentally important. And I hear people complain about paying for water, and the prices that they pay. But most people I know pay more than that for cable TV. So it’s, we we forget how fundamentally important it is. So water is the first one attracting business is the second one. The third one is don’t engage youth. And it has the quintessential story about how we do the opposite of what we mean to every strategic plan I’ve seen in a community says engage more youth. Every presentation I do someone says how do we get more young people here? How do we get them to stay here, but but off line, I hear them talking about how there’s no hope and no future in the community and all the young people need to move to the city because there’s no business opportunities and no jobs. And then they sit there and wonder why they leave when all of their conversations chased them away and forced them out of town. deceive yourself is number four. We get into shop elsewhere which I know is popular which is of commerce. It’s chapter five, Chapter Six is don’t paint followed by don’t cooperate in the past. And that’s one of my favorite chapters talking about the the NIMBYs the nopes the bananas, the cave people and the fears all acronyms for different perspectives that that sabotage our our thinking about the future. Nine is seniors that shut them out 10 is reject every new idea 11 out ignore outsiders. 12 is grow complacent. And that’s that’s particularly for communities that are doing well and assume they will always do well, which is not the case. And the last one this chapter 13 Don’t take responsibility. It’s a great way to ensure your community fails is just to turn around and blame other people for

Brandon Burton 17:14
Absolutely, yeah. Excuse me, those, those 13 ways really should be eye openers, I think when you put it in that perspective of here’s how you kill your community. I mean, if you went after it from the perspective of do these things, and you’ll be prosperous and do well, it gets ignored. So

Doug Griffiths 17:33
it does and everyone goes, Yeah, we’re doing that. Exactly. You’re also doing the opposite. And that’s most of us can find success if we just stopped doing the things that sabotage that success.

Brandon Burton 17:44
Exactly. So on this 13 Ways to Kill Your Community Facebook group, for chambers. I posed the question out there. This is the first time I’ve done this for a podcast episode, I actually asked people what questions they would like to have you answer. And I got some some good questions. So we didn’t go any you know, we didn’t do any prep. You and I on this. So I’m just going to ask you some of these questions, have you feel them and circle back to stories out of the book, as you see applicable? But the first one is, what is the biggest thing that chambers get wrong about community development? And their role in it? What what might be that blind spot for for Chambers of Commerce?

Doug Griffiths 18:30
That’s a, that’s a great question. And I may, it’s a big category, because there’s quite a few things that that chambers get wrong, there’s things that all of us get wrong. So I don’t want anyone to think I’m being hypercritical chambers. But so if we’re going to focus on chambers, there are multiple things one, chambers often think that they’re the BL and and all business, and that their role is simply to advocate or lobby for businesses. And and then you get the money sets where you get the perspective that hey, we need to lower taxes to make businesses more profitable and get rid of the regulations. And that becomes the the core the the fundamental issue that chambers deal with. And yet, that might have worked back in the 80s, when when businesses did locate just were that you have the lowest taxes and you had the least number of regulations. But that’s not the way the world works anymore. In fact, back in the 80s, my parents used to move to where the jobs were on parents generation. But now the jobs move to where people want to live. And so economic development is community building successful businesses is community building. Community Building is economic development there there there that you can’t separate them anymore. And so Chambers of Commerce need to also advocate for reasonable taxes and reasonable regulations to make sure that you can create the kind of community that’s called To attract people who want to live there, and then businesses will attract it because you now have a workforce. But I, you know, I see so many chambers just saying oh, are the highest tax jurisdiction and most of the time, that’s a lie. But the impression, I have yet to go to a community where people don’t say, Oh, we’re the highest tax jurisdiction in the entire state of the entire province, everyone believes that, but that can’t be true for everyone. And most cases, it’s not so chambers could help with that. And the other big issue that I think chambers, miss, and again, this isn’t every chamber, but a lot of chambers get so buried in what they think they’re supposed to be doing. They forgot what’s what’s important. So we’ve seen many chambers that charge membership dues to businesses to raise funds, so they can hire someone to put on a big event, so that they can raise enough money to keep paying someone to collect dues, so they can put on a big event and around and around we go. Yeah, and yet, I mean, a lot of businesses, chambers should be helping with some professional development for businesses about about how to make their business more successful, but how to how to ensure that they have quality brick and mortar locations, but also have an online presence so they can grow, showing them how to how to reach out beyond the community with their business practices, but also to fully engage the community so that people want to shop local, that whole mantra, shop local is a is a guilt ridden mantra, that doesn’t work anymore, you’ve got to give people a reason to want to shop local. So those would be a few of the big things that I think chambers miss.

Brandon Burton 21:37
Absolutely. What just struck a chord with me was the, you know, helping the businesses be able to sell brick and mortar but online as well. And reminds me of the chapter shop elsewhere. Right? If you’re not helping your members be able to sell their products online, essentially, people are shopping elsewhere. And that’s going to have effects down the road.

Doug Griffiths 21:59
Yet one of the challenges businesses we hear from businesses, which I mean chambers can help with this is that I don’t have time, I don’t have time to have an online presence. I don’t have time to wash the windows and put up a window display that will attract people in or to beautify the business or to change the aroma or to I don’t have time, except, except it falls right into that old mantra of why does everyone not have time to do it right, but they have time to do it again. If you don’t take time to do it, now you might not be in business, and then you’ll have nothing but time, but it’ll be too late.

Brandon Burton 22:33
That’s right, I’d seen a quote and I wish I could give proper attribution to it. But it is along the lines of if you had the importance of having systems and if you’re too busy to have systems, you’ll always be too busy. So you need to be able to set aside the time to do things right. So one of the the next questions that I wanted to pose to you, as we had mentioned, chambers being having a key role in economic development, community development. So if that’s the role of a chamber is to help develop and help their community progress. How does a chamber get others particularly government entities to take them seriously.

Doug Griffiths 23:19
If we we’ve seen a lot of communities where the the chamber is trying to be progressive that trying to help with beautification downtown and create more advanced to draw businesses downtown. And it falls on deaf ears with the the larger Economic Development Authority or Alliance, so the town or the city or the county or the and my I have the same advice for everyone. Around this. Most of the time, we see our role and we see our job. And we expect other organizations to realize how important we are. Or, or if they don’t we do a presentation to explain why our role is important and how important we are. So it’s like, it’s like we’re lobbying constantly to get attention. And if you want to be successful, stop lobbying, and start building relationships. Because then you can find common ground and you can find common understanding. So I say all the time we see Chambers of Commerce show up with a PowerPoint presentation to explain why businesses are important. Everyone knows businesses are important. We see Chambers of Commerce do a presentation to explain why the Chamber of Commerce is important. Of course they are. But instead find common ground between you in the town. I mean, they’re important to if you want to talk to somebody and build a relationship, you don’t show up and say I’m amazing and I’m important to you because I do this. You the art of conversation is to find common ground to find out what motivates them to find out what interests them, and then define how you can link your common motivations and your common understanding and your common purpose together and build an alliance well that’s that’s what chambers should be doing is So while my advice is always stop thinking you need to show up at Town Council with a presentation. And start with beer and burgers, like honestly start with building relationship in a common understanding. So you know each other’s first names, if you know the names of their kids, and they know the names of your kids, it’s really hard for you to argue, because you start to, to appreciate your human beings. And then when you’ve got common goals about growing the downtown core with new housing and beautification to make the businesses profitable, which increases the tax base as a generates new businesses and new employment. And now you have a common understanding. And you can talk about how you’re going to achieve it together. Instead of saying, Look, I’m important, and you need to do this for me in order for me to be successful, but every organization has 50 people showing up and saying that it starts to fall on deaf ears, because it gets tiring build relationships to distinguish yourself. Right?

Brandon Burton 25:52
I love that advice. As we, in different communities, there may be different initiatives that come up, and a chamber may get behind the idea of you know, a beautification project, or maybe it’s something legislative, that they’re trying to get behind. That’s pro business. And in the book, you talked about the different factions, you know, and you come up to voting, and in you mentioned, specifically the fourth faction, which is the largest, which is those that in the community that are just disengaged, they don’t show up to vote, they don’t pay attention to what’s going on in the community, necessarily. So this next question would be kind of around that, how do we rally the troops to get them engaged? Or how do we get that community buy in? Especially in a world where we see more decline with volunteers and youth joining civic organizations? And how do we reach out to them and make make it a priority for them to be engaged?

Doug Griffiths 26:53
That’s such a big question. There’s so much to unpack. And you’re right, those those. There’s always those factions, those in support of something that was opposed to something and the 95% of people that have no idea what’s going on and don’t care because they’re so busy with the day to day lives, we we’ve lost the art of real communication. I don’t know that it’s it’s a recent loss. It’s it’s been going on for a while, I mean, a lot of communication is got drilled down to press releases, and newsletters and announcements and not a lot of real conversation. And with social media that’s just amped up. Now. Now, you you put out a press release, and 500 other organizations have the same idea and that gets lost in the noise. So my advice always is to go back to the original social network, the word of mouth communication. You want to move people, the majority of people to start to be excited about the future and where you’re going and what you’re doing. You got to have the conversation with them. Again, it’s the same sort of argument with the with the town and chambers build some of those relationships, you’ve got to listen a lot to what what people’s issues are, and and then inspire them about what the potential for the future is so that they know what you’re doing and why. I mean, I can’t I can’t tell you how many communities I’ve seen that decide we’re going to undertake a downtown beautification project. Now they they understand the twinkle lights in the front edge, redoing the front’s and more social activities brings people downtown which makes businesses more profitable. It increases the social center and makes it a hub. And it’s a way to revitalize our downtown’s. And then you hear everyone in the community say, Well, this is this is just fluff. Why are we doing this? Because they don’t understand why there’s good. There’s good research, good, good evidence show that it’s valuable. But we don’t talk to people about it and explain why and then we wonder why they’re opposed. And then that that other faction that’s typically not engaged is easily swayed by the NIMBYs the nopes, the bananas, the cave, people in the fears, those negative people that are constantly critics and and afraid of what everyone’s doing. And and so even when they’re not very inspired still to participate, they’ll sign the petition, they’ll drop in a form letter, email, and suddenly this is wave of opposition. And it’s because we haven’t properly communicated. And so my advice is always reinvigorate the original social network, the face to face communication, you can’t do it once you can’t do it twice, you got to do it a million times, you got to do it forever. And if you ever stop, then the relationship stops. And then you know some of those some of those that can help with the buy in and the excitement and then volunteers understand why instead of just well, I need you to do this. They understand why they’re doing it. They’re connecting it every every good business, every good company has had a vision for the company and every single employee from from the janitor to the CEO, understands what they’re trying to achieve in the vision they have and then they understand their role in helping make that a reality and they want it to be successful. We should be doing that with our communities. That’s why we changed our, we have a different approach for strategic planning. And then we also with the even when we get more volunteers when people buy in, because they really get why we’re doing it. And it’s exciting. And they want to be part of an authentic community, which is only accentuated more since this pandemic, we also have to understand how people volunteer. So I hear way too many people say, Oh, these young people don’t care about their community, and they don’t want to volunteer that’s complete garbage. That is such garbage these, the younger generation, and millennials and the generation Zed Z, are are actually very staunch community builders, they’re very concerned about their communities and where they live. The challenge we have is that they don’t want to volunteer the way older generations did. There’s there’s there’s not one of them that wants to join the elks and show up for a meeting the third Thursday of every month to drink a bunch of beer and go, Yeah, let’s volunteer. They don’t want that commitment. But you give them a project, a gig to work on. And they will volunteer on that project, you know, you’ve got to an environmental cause you got to clean up a park, you’ve got to do something like that, they’ll come, they just don’t want to have to show up the third Thursday of every month at a meeting. And it’s part of the way societies evolve. We live in the gig culture now. And that’s the way they respond. So we got to stop complaining that they don’t want to volunteer and start creating opportunities for them to volunteer in the way they want to volunteer instead of lamenting the fact that don’t do what we’ve done for 40 years. Sorry, I know that was really long.

Brandon Burton 31:27
No, that’s good. I’d like that point that being in a gig culture, and that’s how we engage the youth now is it’s one one gig at a time, right? We got a cleanup project or whatever. And, yeah,

Doug Griffiths 31:39
it’s one of my favorite things. Sorry. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 31:43
I get so excited. This Yeah. If you’re asking for that long term commitment, they kind of glaze over. So I think that’s a great point. Go ahead.

Doug Griffiths 31:51
Oh, to start, because I get so excited about this stuff. I love doing these presentations. But one of my favorite stories was from it was a young man in a community of about 3000 people in the US. And he wanted to clean up one of the local parks, and it was him that wanted to do it. So we went to the town to say, Hey, I’m going to do this, can I do this? Well, the response was, Well, we should get you some garbage bags. And actually, we need to double check and make sure our insurance covers it. Because if you fall and break your leg or crack your head open, we might be insured. Oh, and by the way, maybe we should put a budget to get those garbage bags for you. And then we should actually create a a notice so that other people can come and join. And they had all sorts of issues to deal with. And they said come back in six months, and what will we be approved by them? Well, he looked at them and said, Forget you, I don’t think he used that F word. But when he went to the park with a bunch of his friends, and they cleaned up the park, they took pictures of it before and it wasn’t bad. They just wanted to brighten it up. And they took pictures of it after he got into trouble from the town because he didn’t get permission. But he posted the pictures on Instagram. And 1000s of other young people did the same thing in their community. They said this is a great idea. I think the hashtag was clean like community or clean up my community or clean up my park, something like that 1000s and 1000s of young people from Canada in the United States went into their community and cleaned it up. There was a massive movement. And and yet, not one municipality was responsible for it or instigated, and it just demonstrates that, that these younger generations don’t need permission. They’re not waiting for authority, they don’t give a damn what your title is. They’re used to working in a gig economy in a flat environment. And when they see a cause they want, they’re going to go take care of it. So that makes them some of the most ardent community volunteers we’ve ever seen. And we need to embrace that and find opportunities for them to succeed. Absolutely. I’m

Brandon Burton 33:41
sure there wasn’t one lawsuit either somebody tripping in the park while they’re cleaning up.

Doug Griffiths 33:46
Not one, not one. It was amazing.

Brandon Burton 33:49
Yeah. So if I understand the right word of mouth, Trump’s press releases for those that are disengaged, right. Yeah, imagine Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So the next question that we had is, is the chamber model that we currently have? Is it missing something? Or is it not providing the true needs of the businesses in our community? Yeah,

Doug Griffiths 34:15
definitely. I mean, there’s some modern chambers that are doing some pretty interesting things. But like I said before, this traditional chamber model seems to be collect some funds in membership dues to hire someone to put on an event to raise enough funds to keep that person hired to collect membership dues, and put on an event and round around we go. And yet they’re one of the biggest things I think that’s missing the chamber should be doing is some professional development for their businesses, showing them you know, how to enhance the bricks and mortar, having classes for them to you know, there’s still so many consults going around and you spent $10,000 to get a website designed and if you’re, you got the wrong person, if that’s what it’s costing to design. You should there’s so many Easy Ways to set one up very easily. I’m doing a little training about social media. I mean, there’s there’s a, there’s a business in Williston, North Dakota that was so impressed with Grayson plan you they started off with a, the main street was redesigned and beautified. And then this business opened up and it was very chic. It was very nice. But you can imagine and Willesden, they had smaller client base. But as they continued to sell product, they moved on to Instagram and, and they started posting pictures of their clothes, and clients would then post pictures of them wearing their clothes and built this sort of culture, this unique culture that they owned, and now they get orders from all over the United States and Canada, for the close, they do more of their business on Instagram than they do on Main Street. But they need both. And they would like both, we could use a little professional development for businesses like that. And I think chambers of the organization that can take the lead. And, and so they’ve got to sort of get over the mindset that the businesses are going to tell the chambers to lobby the town and start to think you’re a collective resource to help us grow the business community and make each of us more profitable, and then focus on on some of that professional development too.

Brandon Burton 36:13
I think it’s a great response. Good good fodder for for chambers to listen to and, and figure out how can they continue to stay relevant and and kind of adjust their their business models? This next question that I have is one that I was thinking of as I was reading through the book, and he touched on it some in the book, but I wanted to hear just straight perspective from you in today’s world. What is the importance of community?

Doug Griffiths 36:47
Oh, wow. All right. So we got an hour or so left? Yeah, that’s. Yeah, you know, so we do this, because I think community building is the single most important job on Earth. And I’ve thought that way since since I, when I entered politics back in 2002. And if anything, it’s more true today than it’s ever been. Now, I know being in political circles. A lot of people say families the most important thing. But I’m kind of hesitant about governments or programs to serve families, because families are so different. It’s so diverse. I actually believe if we focus on building communities, then leadership is successful. Businesses are profitable, and families can take care of themselves and each other. So I always encouraged all three levels of government to focus on community building. And that has been everything I had, had lobbied for and argued about for last 20 plus years, has has been proved important through and post pandemic. And it’s because we, we we discovered that if if we were homebound because we were sick that Amazon didn’t send us a note to say hey, are you okay? They sent a note and said, hey, it’s Friday, it’s a good time to shop. That’s it. But I heard, I’ve heard countless stories of now business saying well, you know, they come in every three days, and I haven’t seen them all week. And they’ll call and say, Hey, is everything okay? And they’re there to support each other and help each other. And we’ve we’ve actually seen, we saw the trend before the pandemic. And I’ve argued about this, I’ve I’ve presented the evidence about this people moving from Los Angeles and San Francisco and New York into places like Boise, Idaho, and Des Moines, Iowa and Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Zionsville, Indiana. And so they’re they’re moving to, to communities that are offering a quality of life. And it’s post pandemic or command of this pandemic. Even during the pandemic, people were fleeing to their parents place in small towns or to the cottage country like to get out of the city. And, and this pandemic has made us all aware that we can now work from home, we can do a lot of stuff from home, and that we really want to be in a community that we can where we can go down to the yoga studio, we can go to the brew pub, we can go to the the locally owned coffee shop, we can socialize and talk to each other on Main Street again, recreating that desperately after being locked up for two years. And so it’s demonstrated just how important community is. And it’s also demonstrated that this notion that rural communities, small towns are dying, is no longer true. That’s where people want to be and if we are ready to be to modernize and to provide the quality of life you want. We’re we’re the ones that don’t aren’t stuck with a lot of infrastructure and and sunk costs like the cities are so we can’t rejuvenate as quickly. We can do it very quickly, and they’re looking for us. We just need to make the changes necessary and attract them out there. So, I mean, everything to me has demonstrated, especially in the last few years, just how vital communities are to the human psychology. And I think this is a ripe opportunity. In fact, the next book I’m working on is 13. pathways forward for communities, it’s, you know, it’s about the mindsets and the things that we could do to capitalize on, on what’s coming.

Brandon Burton 40:17
I like that. So I guess the basis for that question about the importance of community in today’s environment is so much is done online. And you’d mentioned Amazon and I just I wanted to give a plug for the the Alberta chambers, I mean, right there in your region, is doing some pretty interesting things with taking things digitally, putting their, you know, the business members online and, and helping set up ecommerce sites and, and doing some of these innovative things. That is building their community. So people can shop online, but still support Alberta and the chambers in that region. So I think there’s a lot of significance still to community, even in the world of technology and, and internet and so forth. In your book, you had mentioned that you’re always looking and observing other ways that people go about community killing their communities. Is there a couple examples that you’ve learned since writing the book that that you’d be ready to share that you’ve learned, of, of way, new ways that you’ve found and are discovered? Yeah, I

Doug Griffiths 41:34
actually, I have a list in a folder on my desk. 13 More Ways to Kill Your Community. Yeah, it’s a long list. It’s it’s amazing how how often people find new ways to sabotage your own success, it’s. So if I was to write another 13 Ways to Kill Your Community, the first chapter would be don’t have conductivity and broadband service. Here in Canada, it’s been declared an essential service that the funding isn’t quite there yet to start to back it up. And we still haven’t even addressed all of our water issues, especially to our First Nations and indigenous communities yet, but I’m confident that we’re going to address that, but but everything the way the world is changing, especially again, post pandemic we can do education is important to the future of our communities and opens all those doors up to attract new people, that it’s as important as water is, and you will die without it. So that would be one of the top ones. The another new one that’s I’ve added to the list since through the pandemic, or over the last few years, is let politics divide you. We’ve seen and it’s it’s across, I think it’s around the whole world. Actually, we’ve seen this notion that, you know, the right is always right, and the left is always wrong, or vice versa. This this polarizing politics, we have got to prevent from infiltrating our community building. Because community is about having people with different opinions and different walks of life and diversity all being together. That’s what makes a community. If if we all agreed, if we all had the exact same mindset, then I mean, it’s not healthy. In fact, there’s been research done on on corporations and boards of directors that all have, this is my quote. But if you have a board of directors that that are all, quote, unquote, qualified, now that you’ve got 10 People who are all the most qualified to run a business, historically, they were 50 year old white males with MBAs. But if you put 1050 year old white males with MBAs in the room, you get one opinion, because they all have the same background, the same experience the same education, you need diversity, to be successful. And it’s the same with communities but, but we’ve got this notion that we we all need to think alike be alike, and anyone who isn’t exactly like us is now the enemy. And that is tearing our communities apart, for the sake of ideology and ideology, I have never found to be right ideas are what are important to help our communities move forward. And so I would, I would say, you know, the chapter two of the next book would be lead ideology where people park rip your community apart.

Brandon Burton 44:22
Yeah, that is powerful. That’s a very real example that we’ve been seeing lately.

Doug Griffiths 44:28
Yeah, and it’s been all over the world. I’m it’s not anyone. It’s not in any particular jurisdiction. But it’s it’s a dangerous precedent. And it’s built on anger. And I anger. You know, I don’t have it in the book, but I say during the presentations. The second most evil of all human traits is envy because it sabotages our own success when we’re envious of others. We need people in the community to be successful. But the most evil of all human traits is anger. And I use the phrase your anger is a liar. It’s a self propagating hatred machine. And he experienced it, you, you go to work hitting potholes and then the front of your car doesn’t, you know, it swears a little bit and you’re angry and you didn’t get the promotion at work and you come home and, and the kids didn’t take the garbage out, you’re like God told you to take the garbage out. And it just continues to feed until it becomes a rage. If you’re in a happy mood, and you come home and you see the kids didn’t take the garbage out, you’re like, come on, I asked you to try and remember, the angry you are, the more angry you look to become. And our anger is ripping our communities apart. And it’s being fed by politics, and we’ve got to get around it. Or we’re gonna sabotage your own success.

Brandon Burton 45:40
Yeah. Well, I hope you do come out with that book. It’s 13 More ways, your community. As we start wrapping things up here, I wanted to ask if you’ve been very generous with time and, and knowledge and insight, but what might be one tip or action item that you would suggest for Chamber Champion to do to help lift their community to the next level?

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Doug Griffiths 46:04
Well, I mean, start the conversation about what the future can be and make sure the conversation is positive. Now we can we can always cite, you know, what’s wrong, oh, our main streets are ugly, or our, our town doesn’t work with us or taxes are too high, start with with something positive, and help educate people. And so my advice, the very first bit of advice I always give to chambers of commerce, is have a session on customer service. Because I’ve been to lots of small towns that go into the businesses and they look at me like, who are you? And what are you doing here? Yay, for customer service, me, every single person you connect within a community is a reflection of that community. So all it takes is the very first person to be unfriendly or look grumpy, or look like they’re there. They’re not You’re not welcome. And man, the impression of the is that the whole town is like that. It’s so customer service, whether you’re going into the town office, or going into a business, it doesn’t take a lot to smile and say, Hey, welcome. This is great. And then, you know, there’s so many ways to improve that customer service. And it’s funny, the mean, evidence, psychological research shows that if we smile, even when we don’t feel like smiling, we eventually feel like smiling, it put it changes our mood, if you walk around with a scowl, you get angry, or if you walk around with a smile, even if you don’t mean it, eventually it becomes a real smile. So just just realizing and helping the businesses realize that when a new person from out of town shows up on Main Street, that first impression is everything. Because it changes the tone changes, the brand changes a story into something positive instead of in something negative. And so my advice is, is that talk about how you can, you can sell your community with a smile.

Brandon Burton 47:59
I love that tip. And in fact, in today’s world, where we’ve have become more digital and chambers have been used to doing, you know, hybrid events and doing things over zoom, and they’ve dove in to the digital part of things, I would maybe take it a step further and do this educational series or, or training or whatever you want to call it on customer service that recorded and you have created a library of things like this. So your employers in your community, as they onboard new employees, five years down the road, 10 years down the road, they can access these trainings on customer service, because some of those things are, you know, they’re always applicable. And it continues to show the relevance for the chamber. It puts a good face on your community, it creates a stronger business there, it’s just a win win all the way around. But I would encourage chambers to capture that and create a library that can be shared amongst the businesses in your community.

Doug Griffiths 49:00
Brilliant, because it’s a good reminder after a year or two to watch, even if you’ve watched it once already a good reminder that customer service. No, that’s brilliant. Absolutely.

Brandon Burton 49:08
So I like asking everybody I have on the show this question. As we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Doug Griffiths 49:21
Well, I think changing that that old world story, that same pattern of behavior, same pattern of operations is is what needs to change. And but anyone who thinks that chambers are defunct and that they’re going to fade away, doesn’t understand the value of chambers. What’s going to go away is the old way of operating and chambers that are going to be successful that are going to provide value for that that membership do that are going to provide value for the council that needs the advice on what businesses are looking for not just the lowest taxes on these regulations, but actually Bringing socialization downtown and Beautification and helping ensure that their prospers, that’s the future and chambers are going to have no problem being successful. If they’re prepared to adapt, just like every other organization, and every other business, adapt or die.

Brandon Burton 50:17
That’s right. And go back and read this book. And if you want to kill your chamber, there’s a course out here for you to do. There’s a bat for you to follow. Madang I have really enjoyed our conversation and having you here with me on Chamber Chat Podcast today, I want to give you an opportunity to share any contact information or ways for people to connect, if they have any questions about what we talked about today. Or if they wanted to connect with you about their community and the services you offer, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you.

Connect with Doug Griffiths

Doug Griffiths 50:51
So my email is Doug@13ways.ca or.com. We have both now. And that’s 13ways.ca or.com. And there’s my cell number two, I always advise people and you’ll hear if you call me. I say please don’t leave a message, you’re better to text me and say, Hey, here’s my name. Here’s where I’m from, quit schedule a time to chat, and then I can text you back. And otherwise you leave a voicemail. And then I have to stop what I’m doing and call in and write it down on a piece of paper and I’ll put it away in my pants and then watch them and I’ll forget you’ll think I’m a jerk because in callback, so text on my cell 587-335-0013. And of course, you can always look up 13 Ways on on Instagram On Facebook, check out our website 13ways.ca or.com where we have a lot of we have free master classes on strategic planning on marketing and communications. And and so check it all out. We also have a a community leaders camp coming up in the beautiful rocky mountains at the end of April. And we have a few spots left. It’s going to be intimate, there’s only going to be about 50 people with some amazing keynote speakers. Obviously, you can check out that information. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for, then just reach out because odds are if you need it, and we haven’t created it yet to help. There’s 1000 Other people needed to and so we’ll get to work on it. So I reached out.

Brandon Burton 52:21
Absolutely, I’ll get all that contact information in our show notes for this episode, which will be found at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode164. But Doug, this has been a real treat to have you on the podcast. And I really appreciate you sharing your time with us today and sharing these key insights as well. Thanks a lot.

Doug Griffiths 52:42
Thanks, Brandon. I really appreciate the work you’re doing to with helping Chambers was so critical of an element to building communities. I just can’t thank you enough. Keep up the great work.

Brandon Burton 52:52
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