Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Brittany Quick-Warner. 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.
Voiceover Talent 0:14
And now, your host, he realizes that the next generation is already doing commerce in the metaverse.
He’s my dad, Brandon Burton.
Brandon Burton 0:22
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, 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.
Our title sponsor is Holman brothers membership sales solutions. Let’s hear Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Diane Rogers, President and CEO of the Rancho Cordova Area Chamber to learn how the Holman Brothers have 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. Holman 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 1:02
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.
member recruiting issues faster and better than anyone else, and they want to put
that knowledge to work for you and your chamber. Learn more at HolmanBros.com.
Guest Introduction
You’re joining us for another episode and our 2022 ACCE chamber the year finalist series and for this episode, we’re joined by Brittany Quick-Warner. Brittany is the president and CEO of the Eugene Area Chamber in Oregon. Brittany has successfully served in multiple capacities in her seven years with the chamber. Beginning in late 2016. Brittany served as interim president and CEO during the sudden medical leave and passing of the long term president and CEO and was ultimately selected in September 2017. To serve as the next President and CEO of the Eugene chamber. Brittany is the youngest and first known woman to lead the 1200 member organization. She has been active in the community since her arrival, serving as board member for several organizations including onward Eugene, travel Lane County, the Arts and Business Alliance of Eugene, bring recycling, better Eugene Springfield transportation and the Junior League of Eugene, as well as serving on the Eugene sustainability Commission and the Lane County poverty and homelessness board. She currently serves on the board of directors for WAC II and ACC. Brittany, I’m excited to have you with me today on Chamber Chat Podcast and congratulations being selected as a chamber of the year finalist. I’d love for you to take a minute to say hello to all the Chamber Champions and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.
Brittany Quick-Warner 2:41
Thanks, Brandon. I appreciate it. Super excited to be here with everyone. Like Brandon said, my name is Brittany and I have the honor of being the chamber CEO here at the Eugene Oregon chamber. I have actually been with our chamber for nine years, I realized, as you read that my bio, um, the small things that you’ve never remember to do. Yeah, so it’ll be nine years this summer. And when I got into this job, it was one of those things I definitely never knew or thought I would be a chamber staffer. I really honestly came into it not really knowing exactly what Chambers of Commerce do so. But I very quickly caught the bug and have been incredibly honored and blessed to have opportunities within the industry that have really kept me here because it’s a little bit sticky once you get really dug in. So something people don’t know or might not know about me. So I’m from the Midwest, I grew up in Kansas City. And my whole life I was a huge weather nerd actually got my bachelor’s degree in atmospheric science and was on the tornado chasing team. And that’s one of the I think most um, I don’t know, one of the saddest things about moving to the West Coast is we have much more boring weather.
Brandon Burton 4:02
We don’t have tornadoes, and yeah, exactly
Brittany Quick-Warner 4:04
my husband’s like, Okay, you have a different bar than most people. But yeah, and actually, I worked in emergency management before I moved to Eugene. So I work for the State Emergency Management Office in Missouri. And it is remarkable how many of the skills that I learned in that job, I deployed over the last couple of years as chamber CEO during the pandemic, so you never know where those previous lives will come back. So
Brandon Burton 4:30
yeah, so I’m in the Texas area. So I know what it’s like when these tornadoes pop up. And it is very interesting. And I’ll have family and friends call me and say, Are you okay? And I am on my back porch watching this thing, you know?
Brittany Quick-Warner 4:45
Yeah, it’s funny when I talk to people and worrying about that. They’re just like, wait, what? How are you kidding? I’m like, no, that’s just when you’re from the Midwest. You just kind of get used to it.
Brandon Burton 4:54
Let’s roll with it. Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about the Eugene’s. chamber, give us an idea of the size of the chamber staff budget scope of work just to kind of give us an idea before we get into our discussion.
About the Eugene Area Chamber
Brittany Quick-Warner 5:09
Yeah, of course. So our chamber has about 1200 Members, we have kind of bounced around between second and third largest chamber in the state of Oregon. We have currently 15 staff. When I got into this position five years ago, we had about six staff. So we’ve grown really quickly and pretty significantly in the last five years. We our budget this year is about 1.9 million. And it’s pretty split between a couple of different revenue streams. So we obviously have our membership base, which is about 30% of our income. We also just a couple years ago, which we can talk a little bit more about launched onward, Eugene, which is the economic development kind of entity for our region after a lot of turmoil in that space as a community for a while. And so a good portion of our income comes through the management of that entity. And then our sponsorships are about 35% of what our revenue is and and then we do a handful of events that bring in a little bit of revenue to
Brandon Burton 6:20
Alright, that’s good. Yeah, that that really helps to kind of set the table for discussion. So as a one of these chamber the year finalist episodes but at what I’ve been doing, what I like to do is focus on the two programs, the program synopsis included on your chamber the year application, and I look forward to learning about these programs and sharing some of those details as soon as they get back from this quick break.
Are you looking for a year round affordable and timely shop local campaign for your chamber or CVB Look no further build a custom each shop play mobile app with App My Community by visiting appmycommunity.com/chamberchat. App My Community mobile apps are not just simple membership directory listings. They provide many more capabilities to engage with your community. Provide your residents with a robust events calendar partner with a local fare festival or Farmers Market provide a schedule map and other resources to promote the event. Run a Small Business Saturday campaign any time of the year using built in scavenger hunts allow your membership to communicate directly to their customers via push notifications. Your app my community mobile app will be a unique member benefit allow you to generate non dues revenue with sponsorship opportunities and best of all provide a valuable resource to your community please visit appmycommunity.com/chamberchat now to receive 10% off your first year of an App My Community mobile app.
Chambers of Commerce have been around for over 400 years promoting communities all over the World. But today so much is found digitally that Chamber Nation believes it’s critical that there is a custodian of local digital information. They believe the Chamber is in a perfect position to be that organization.
Chamber Nation provides an amazing membership management system you use to manage the chamber and the community. They also deliver a complete membership development system that they manage for you to be sure your membership community is fully documented for search and much more. Essentially, Chamber Nation delivers an entire membership support department which is perfect for those Chambers with a limited budget that needs to do more.
With Chamber Nation not only will you have a membership management system but also a membership development system all in one terrific package. So, SAVE MONEY and be impressed by visiting www.RichardsCalendar.com to set up a demo with their CEO. Or learn more at www.ChamberNation.com.
When you really think about it, is it realistic to expect your membership rep to deliver consistent results without consistent coaching? Much like an elite athlete, your membership rep must be aligned and performing at their best which doesn’t happen automatically. Holman Brothers Next Level Coaching programs supply the indispensable training, guidance and support your membership rep needs to keep their performance in high gear. Visit holmanbros.com/nextlevel to learn more and request a free trial of Next Level Coaching.
Alright, Brittany, we’re back. If you would just take us through what the two programs are that you guys submitted on your chamber the your application, maybe just from a high level and then we’ll we can circle back and go into some more detail on those programs.
Topic-Chamber of the Year Application Programs
Brittany Quick-Warner 9:52
Yeah, of course. So this was our first time applying for chamber of the year at least in my tenure, and honestly we were pretty intimidated by the process for a while. And I will say it’s not an easy or it’s not a quick process. There’s a lot of time and effort that has to be put into it. But for those of you listening who think, oh, gosh, I don’t know if I could ever do that. It’s totally worth it. And I will say that because one of the things is it forces you to really think about, okay, where have we found success? And what programs do we have that are really cutting edge, and we’re really kind of pushing the envelope. And I think as chamber executives, we, we sometimes often move on to the next thing very quickly, without celebrating like, hey, we actually are doing some good stuff here. And we should, we should think about that. So it was hard for us to kind of whittle it down to a couple of programs that we really wanted to highlight. But the two that we did choose, one of them is last year, we launched a freemium membership model. So a basic membership that is 100%, free to, to folks to join the chamber, and took a lot of time to really analyze that decision to do that. Think about pros and cons. But ultimately, the reasoning behind it were was a couple of reasons. One, we were diving really deep into work on equity, inclusion and diversity and really trying to analyze internally, what can we do as an organization to really create a more equitable, membership and organization and more inclusive, and have a lot of listening sessions with bipoc members in our community and businesses who maybe weren’t members of the chamber and giving some perspective as to why. So that’s one piece. But then we also do a lot of advocacy as an organization. And we wanted to make sure that we could really bring in as many businesses as possible to help advocate on their behalf. Which leads to the second synopsis that we applied, using, which is the work we’ve been doing around homelessness. So the city of Eugene and Lane County, which is a county we sit in, we have more than 4000 individuals living on the streets of our community on housed. It’s one of the highest per capita in the country. And it is a really, it’s a crisis. And it is growing. And it’s feels to a lot of folks in the community like it’s completely out of control. And that was an issue that our businesses really kind of stepped up and said, we have got to do something and where is the chamber out on this issue? And how are we influencing the future of, of our community and the prosperity of these individuals who have living on the streets. So we dove in really deep, and we can talk a little bit more about the details of that program. But ultimately, what we ended up doing was releasing a really extensive report on the state of homelessness in our community. And then that has catalyzed a ton of things that have come out of it. One of it being a business leaders taskforce of over 100 businesses who’ve come together to really say we want to provide leadership in this space. So I can go into more detail about
Brandon Burton 13:09
let’s, let’s start with that one. So homelessness, and the focus you guys are putting on there, because I think there’s, there’s so many unique traits and attributes, you know, they go across that topic that, hey, and you guys probably ever realized there’s no one one size fits all right, for all the different reasons why somebody may be homeless. So as you dug in, and did research and and looked at what the problem is, what are some of those things that you’ve discovered? And have you gone about addressing it?
Brittany Quick-Warner 13:42
Yeah, good question. So when we decided that we needed to have some sort of voice in this, I very much said to my board, I don’t know what our role should be. At this point. There’s a lot of places where it feels like, we need improvements. And I don’t know what the Chamber’s role is. And I think we have two options. One, we can either just get really mad and angry about the state of this crisis and marched down to City Hall and pound our fists on the table and tell our city councilors, you have to do something about this. Which if I looked, you know, if I fast forward five years, and I looked back at this moment, I could not honestly say that I felt like that would make an impact on the number of people sleeping on the streets. And the other option was to get really deep and strategic and to to flex that problem solving muscle that a lot of chambers have that they might not feel like this is their problem to solve. But the reality is it’s impacting our businesses. It’s impacting our local economy. It’s impacting the overall livability of our community. And those individuals living on the streets obviously are in dire need of someone to advocate for better quality of life as well. So we decided to go that route. It was the harder of the two options. But what that looked like was, was us as it’s chamber has staff going out and having individual conversations with over 200 people in our community to really understand the issue deeper and to try to help suss out what are some of the barriers or the roadblocks that we’re facing in our system that has gotten to this point, we talked to unhoused individuals themselves, we talked to business owners to every nonprofit that works in this space in our community, which there’s a lot of them. We talked to communities across the country to try to find out best practices, what others are doing. And ultimately, what we had was about 250 pages of notes from all of these conversations that we realized we needed to do something with. And we knew we weren’t the experts on this. But we had gleaned an enormous amount of information that we really felt like if we could summarize this down and boil it to a handful of recommendations, just based on what we’ve learned from all these experts in our community, that we could bring a lot more clarity to the conversation. And so that’s what we did, we’re gonna release this report, which is a living document where, you know, we’re kind of always sort of going back and finding ways to improve or other ideas. But one of the things, you know, that we heard a lot in the community is we don’t know what’s happening in this space, or whatever is happening isn’t working, or we don’t think anything is happening at all. And all of those things were leading to this sense of hopelessness amongst community members that we will never be able to get our heads wrapped around this problem. So out of that, what we came up with was eight recommendations that we felt like if we could focus in on these eight areas, and move some initiatives forward together as a community, that we can make a real, real dent, in in that enhanced number. And a couple of key areas that we really pushed on is one, better accountability and transparency. Our city and county officials are the entities that control really the conversation around homelessness and services and funding. And they’re doing good work. But there’s not very good communication or transparency coming out of those entities. And so it’s causing this sense of hopelessness. The second was, there was no, there is no clear shared vision, every person we talked to had a different idea of what the end goal was. And we all know that without a really clear shared vision for what we’re trying to accomplish, we’re going to be going in different directions. Even if we all have the same sort of, you know, good hearted intentions.
We also knew that our community needed to take a serious look at how we’re holding people accountable. And that was something that we knew was going to get us a little bit of pushback, because a lot of times in this space, people don’t want to associate crime and homelessness. And we weren’t trying to by any way, say that we’re trying to criminalize homelessness, but there is crime happening on our streets that people need to be held accountable for. We also talked about good data, about wraparound services and how individuals we might be getting them into shelter, but we’re not providing them this the services they need to actually get well. So those eight recommendations came out. And one of the biggest ones that we’ve been pushing all along is this crisis is bigger than our city and our county can handle on their own, it’s bigger than our nonprofit community can handle on its own. It is to the point where it is truly the entire community’s issue that we all have to come together around the table to try and solve. And we’ve honestly, I think, gotten a surprising amount of pushback from some of our local park or government partners in sort of letting go of of some of those pieces and allowing private sector to come to the table to say, What could we be doing to contribute positively to this conversation. So that idea of collective impact and a shared vision is one that we’ve really been trying to hone in on as a chamber and to try to convene enough voices to actually achieve that shared that shared vision, or identify and then achieve that shared vision. So all of this really like capacity building community building work, is exactly where I think chambers should be in their communities. And while it feels maybe like that’s not a space that we should operate in, I think it 100% is if you’re living up to being the convener, catalyst champion chamber for your community, right. And there is a bottom line impact on businesses. So I do think there’s an argument for the chamber being involved in that conversation. We’ve been able to catalyze some really cool projects out of this. We’ve had private sector folks who are now coming to the table who’ve never been engaged in this and they’re coming up with these really big visionary ideas that they have the resources to execute on, that no one else had even thought about, including that person in the conversation and now they’re adding to the pie instead of splitting it up amongst other nonprofits. So it’s been a year Ever since we really started digging into this, and we’ve already, you know, we’ve already seen about 200 temporary, but emergency shelters open up that private sector individuals gave their space to be used for that, that were not happening before the chamber got involved in this conversation, we have a couple of workforce pilots, where we have a local business owner who’s starting an entire different business line specifically, and only for hiring unhoused individuals and building a workforce pipeline for them to get trained into other industry jobs in the community. We have really great communications out to businesses about how to protect their properties, how to report issues, if they have them resources for if they do have crime, or an incident happen. So, you know, we’re some low hanging fruit, but then also some really cool. Like I said, visionary projects that wouldn’t have happened if the chamber hadn’t has said, Hey, let us bring all these businesses to the conversation as well.
Brandon Burton 20:59
Right now, as I think of this topic, I view it as an onion, right, it’s got all these layers to it. And I agree, I think the chamber is the perfect entity to peel back those layers and to convene, you kind of reorganize and put put things together and get those right, you know, example together and look at what the real problems are. Because it for whatever reason, and you know, various cities throughout the country. Homelessness tends to be attracted to certain cities, for whatever reason, you know, for a variety of reasons, we’ll say. So to be able to identify what those reasons are, and then why you go about trying to solve the problem, to not make it more attractive for you know, to drum. It’s it’s a, it’s a balance and multiple layers,
Brittany Quick-Warner 21:46
for sure. Yeah, yeah. And I think just setting the table, like I said, for more people to come and sit and contribute positive ideas, and that’s something we’ve been very intentional about is this is not a space for you to come in to complain or event, right. We’ve all done that. We all know what the issues are. This is a place for you to say, okay, given all this information, I have here some ideas that I want to bring to the conversation. And it’s we’ve been really successful in that. And I think that’s one thing that even if there’s skeptics out there about the chamber, really leading this conversation, what we’ve gotten is great feedback that they feel like, okay, this is definitely constructive. It’s, you know, it’s moving us in the right direction, and not just distracting us from the overall goal, which has been really rewarding,
Brandon Burton 22:31
right. And in the end, it makes a huge impact on the community as a whole. So I think that’s a great, great program, great area of focus, for sure. Let’s shift gears a little bit over to your freemium model. Curious, did you guys reach out and talk to like Tom Baldrige or any of these other chambers that have rolled out freemium models in the past? Yeah, so
Brittany Quick-Warner 22:55
we, there was a couple of chambers out there that we knew when we started doing this research. And so we did we sit down, we sat down Tiffany Esposito down in Florida. And I believe my staff might have talked to Tom as well. Just to say, like, you know, you’re a few few months ahead of us, like, how’s it going? And we got good feedback from them that, you know, so far, so good. And our board was definitely interested in, in just looking at membership structures overall differently and trying to say, like, are we being proactive in the way that we’re sort of selling ourselves to the community. And it helped, I had a tech CEO as my board chair, during the time that we were having this discussion and, and he’s, he was the first one to say, like, our business model is totally based on freemium, you know, applications and services that we then convert into paid customers. And so you know, he really encouraged us to look at that at that model as not a way to give away our membership. But to bring more people in who we maybe wouldn’t have had the hook for prior to offering an option that really does just expose them to all the things that they could be investing in, right.
Brandon Burton 24:08
And chambers often say they’re the voice of business. And to be able to say, we’re the voice of business, but not your business, because you’re not a dues paying member doesn’t really seem right either. So I like the idea of a freemium model and being there as a support for all the business in your community. It’s just a matter of making it work to where the revenue still works out and your chamber can still function, right? Yeah. And
Brittany Quick-Warner 24:31
the Yeah, honestly, the pandemic was a big motivator for us because what we did is a lot of our a lot of our programs and the training and the information resources that we were putting out to the community, we took down that paywall for all of it during a pandemic. We wanted anyone and everyone who has a business to be to hear about and to have access to these resources. We did a lot of web hours and trainings on all of the federal regulations and you know, grants and all all of these things that were coming out. And we were not restricted to just members in that space. And so what we saw was a lot of people that had never engaged with the chamber, and then also would have never heard about any of those resources, if it wasn’t for the chamber reaching out to them, even though they weren’t a member saying, hey, take a look at this thing. And so that is what really inspired us to say, like, Okay, we could do this, we could open it up, we could bring more people under the umbrella. And then it’s on us as chamber staff, and as you know, our board leadership to show the value of their investment. So they hopefully transition up to a paid member, we’re just coming up on a year of this program. Actually, July one is when we launched it last year. And so right now, our membership staff have a strategy for getting, you know, obviously, they’ve been coordinating or engaging with those members all year, but making sure to sit down and have those sales conversations about hey, come in at this other level. And here’s the benefits we can provide. And here’s what your investment is getting you. And so that was one of the other motivations is it’s a built in sales pipeline, right? How many Tony chambers have sat there and sort of like bang their heads against the wall saying, where’s my leads? How do I get more leads in my sales pipeline, and we have 150 new members that are in our premium membership that now are built in sales pipeline for selling paid memberships. So, so far, we’ve done good, and in some of those conversions, we’re still sort of waiting on the big kind of number of how many of those people transition in the first year. So preliminarily, the numbers look good as far as our ability to retain and to bring in new members. But you know, jury’s still out a little bit to see how it ends up after a year.
Brandon Burton 26:52
So as you rolled out this program, the premium model, how did you go about informing the businesses in your community? Did you get a business list from the county and just do a mass mailing? Or how did you go about the messaging to get that out?
Brittany Quick-Warner 27:07
Yeah, good question. So our community, I think, is disadvantaged in that we don’t have a business license program. And so there is no formal like registration here locally for businesses, which would be so fantastic. And I’m we’re trying to convince our city, that’s a good idea. So it’s been really word of mouth, we leaned heavily on our board and some of our other members to sort of say, hey, invite somebody that you know, who maybe wants to consider the chamber, we had a really strong sort of marketing strategy, that first three months of the program, we did radio, we did TV, we had commercials, I was kind of going around and speaking to rotary clubs and other entities that have business affiliates, or memberships. And we had, we saw a lot of folks start coming in, and that in that first three months with just that general promotion, and then we’ve kind of just left it open. And as we’ve engaged folks, we we didn’t set a strong sort of number. On the freemium side, if we want to hit X number of members, we have an overall membership goal. And so, you know, that freemium membership will help us get to those numbers that we’re trying to achieve that way. But, you know, we were pretty regimen in the whole process, you know, we did a lot of deep work with our board to help them, you know, make sure they were comfortable with it, talk to other chambers laid out what the program would look like, got very specific on the benefits for that free membership, it’s very scaled back from what are other benefits offer, obviously. And then we did a lot of kind of focus groups talking to folks and got their feedback on it and, and then ultimately launched it. And it has helped us save some members, too. That wasn’t the main goal. But we have some businesses that you all know, did not fare well during the pandemic, and they appreciate want to continue to support the chamber. But financially, they aren’t able to, we’re able to bump them down to that freemium level, and then flag their membership database to like, get them back up, hopefully the next year. So instead of losing them all together, we get to keep them in the chamber kind of channels and networks, and then hopefully come bring them back up to a paid member later.
Brandon Burton 29:19
Yeah. And as far as to sharing information with them, and keeping them in the loop of what you’re doing advocacy wise, and things like that doesn’t really cost anything, you know, timewise so why not just keep them involved?
Brittany Quick-Warner 29:31
Yeah, and the other thing that, you know, that we have, we’re monitoring as well is the non dues revenue that they bring in, right, so our freemium members, now we’re on our email list, they see all the events that we have, and they’re paying to attend those events that they wouldn’t have been before they are a member. So we are seeing a good amount of of non dues revenue coming from those free members who are now advertising and they have a higher cost for advertising because you’re not a paid member for attending events. So yeah, there’s a little bit of that happening too, which is good, because we’re at least capturing some sort of revenue from that additional base of membership.
Brandon Burton 30:07
Yeah, absolutely. That’s great. So I wanted to ask you, Brittany, if How do you see the role of the Eugene chamber there in your community?
Brittany Quick-Warner 30:20
How do I see the roll? So, for those of you who are not familiar with ACC II, came out with the Horizon Report a handful of years ago. And in that report, there are a handful of sort of realities that they were predicting that chambers and associations and just sort of the world in general were leaning towards. And one of the things that really stuck out for me in that Horizon Report in which I, you know, I’m constantly going back to with our staff, is this idea of being the sane center. And, and not being afraid to dive into issues, but really, truly trying to bring a non bias perspective to the conversation. We have done advocacy for a long time. But even more so in the last couple of years, have really leaned into this place of being able to, to pull people from all across the community together to say, Look, our overall goal is economic prosperity, and people living happy, healthy lives in this community. And to do that we can’t be, you know, politically, ideological in one way or the other as a chamber. And so we want to represent the st center, the place where I feel like we can find some alignment. And I really think that in our community, our chamber has been really respected for that. And it’s a place that I’m proud for us to be we’re very data driven, we want to see the the actual impacts not just this hyperbolic kind of fear mongering. And because of that, I think we’ve been really successful in our advocacy because people really do respect how much kind of deep research we do on issues before we come out with a position or try to advocate.
Brandon Burton 32:02
Yeah, and I think being the same Senator goes back to the chamber, just seeing a trusted resource to like you had mentioned through the pandemic, these small businesses not knowing where to turn for some of these answers. And you could look at a social media post, or you could look to the chamber who’s done the research. And and same thing with being the same Senator, you can watch these polarizing news channels, or you can look at the Chamber who’s looking at the data and looking out for your interest as a business in the community.
Brittany Quick-Warner 32:27
Yeah, absolutely. And I you know, not to downplay, it’s not easy, often hearing that voice, because it takes a lot more work to actually have done your homework and, and to seek out multiple sources and to really hear both sides out.
Brandon Burton 32:41
And to put aside prices, right? Yep,
Brittany Quick-Warner 32:44
exactly, exactly. However, I think it gets us further in the long run. So it’s worth the extra effort upfront.
Brandon Burton 32:51
Absolutely. So Brittany, what might be maybe a tip or an action item for listeners who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level? What might you suggest for them?
Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions
Brittany Quick-Warner 33:03
Oh, my goodness, I think one of the things that I did early on that really kind of opened my eyes to what’s possible, is I I sat down and like very methodically went through chambers and other communities that I felt like, I wanted to be right, who we aspire to be like, and almost every one of them was in a community that was bigger than us that had more resources than us that had more members. And they weren’t able to do bigger things. Because of that, that level. And I think often if we just kind of look at the folks who are our peers, or who have are similarly resourced, we kind of keep our minds kind of close to what we could be doing. We implemented the Entrepreneurial Operating System, or Eos, which is explained in a book called traction. And Jane Clark at the Michigan West chamber was the speaker at an ACC conference about five and a half years ago that I heard talk about this. And I was absolutely, I just felt like, oh my gosh, someone just planted this in front of me the exact time that I needed it. We were in chaos art, my CEO had just passed away. We were trying to get our feet together under us. I was a new CEO. So I had never managed an organization before. And I desperately needed a tool to help us just like organize and set goals, and just get really strategic with our work. And that US process has helped us do that. But one of the things in that process is looking at 10 years out on a horizon and then backing up three years in one year, and actually visualizing what your organization will look like in 10 years and putting numbers to it. We put a revenue goal, we put a member size we put a retention rate, we put the number of staff that we wanted to see. So and then we backed up In three years, so 2022 was our three year or three year out picture for when we started this. We had envisioned 14 staff in our organization. And we were six people when we started doing this. Here we are in 2022. With 15 staff members, we envision a $2 million revenue. Here we are 1.9. I’m hoping we we beat our budget, and we get that 2 million we envisioned applying for and winning chamber of the year. So we’ll see, I think the honor of at least being a finalist, and you can look at it from three years ago, it was on our list of like, what is what do we imagine for ourselves? And it was remarkable to me how much just that sort of very specific visioning helped us actually get there, right, like putting an actual number to it. And then creating a roadmap to hit that number. And chambers of any size could do that. Right? It’s not it doesn’t have to be like, Oh, well, they’re a big chamber, or they, you know, have X number of members or whatever. Absolutely, you can do that as a one person, staff, volunteer staff member, you know, you can say, in 10 years, what I want to look like in three years, and then how do I get there? So to me, I feel like I we I owe a lot of credit to James Clark is with us process. And then just to our staff for being willing to dream big. We like to, I like to think about it as well, not how sometimes we we How the heck out of things, but we just need to sort of say what is our big vision, and let’s not tear it apart the first time it gets thrown out into the world, and then figure out how to get there. So yeah,
Brandon Burton 36:38
I love that creating that vision, it shows you what’s possible. And then as you create that roadmap, it aligns the resources to make it happen. Yeah. And as it comes together, it’s kind of like, holy smokes, how did this happen? Together, but we have a cup of
Brittany Quick-Warner 36:53
staff who are not with our chamber anymore. They’ve graduated out into the community, I like to say, who wrote me when they saw we post about the chamber of the year, nom, and they’re like, that was on our three year vision, like we actually did it. So it’s kind of fun to like, pull back in some folks who had been there. And they were a part of that. And they remember
Brandon Burton 37:11
that, too. It was impactful that they remember the timeline, and they know that it’s happening. Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah. Well, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Future of Chambers
Brittany Quick-Warner 37:27
Oh, gosh, I think a lot about this being on the WAC and ACC board. I feel, and we’ve heard this from leaders in the industry over the last couple years, I feel like chambers are more valuable and more needed than ever right now. And a lot of it is because of so much just polarization in our world. And I think if chambers can rise above the fray, and really play that same center role and take that problem solver role seriously, communities are going to be desperate for someone who they can look to who’s local, who understands their local issues. It’s not some, you know, outside of the community, who has the interest of everyone in the community at heart and who can who can convene, and do so in a way that people respect and they want to they want to be a part of it. So to me, chambers of the future are not, I think will always be interested in in businesses and representing businesses, because I think the private sector is one that desperately needs to be a part of the solution. But I think that we’re going to be challenged to with solving bigger community issues than just sort of taxes and opposing taxes or supporting taxes, right. It’s homelessness. It’s our housing crisis, its climate and energy. It’s, you know, some of these big hairy issues that our country is facing. If all our chambers got together and really pushed out an agenda around homelessness at the federal level, I think we could do an enormous amount of good at actually impacting this crisis. So that’s where I feel like the future of chambers are is solving those big community issues that are desperate for someone with with respect to step up and solve them.
Brandon Burton 39:11
Yeah, well, everybody heard it here, first Britney’s vision of the future. So we’ll see. What’s the timeframe on this year.
Brittany Quick-Warner 39:18
Three years, give me three years
Brandon Burton 39:21
will solve all the world’s issues, at least the country’s issues and three. So Brittany, I’d like to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect and learn more about how you guys are doing things here in Eugene, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with
Connect with Brittany Quick-Warner
Brittany Quick-Warner 39:39
you? Absolutely. So my email brittanyw@eugenechamber.com. And happy to also have folks give my cell phone or my office phone a call. If you go to the Eugene chamber website on our staff page, you can find those numbers as well. And I Absolutely love connecting with other chambers. I was very lucky to have other CEOs who said yes to me when I was new in this role, and still do for me to pick their brains. So I love returning the favor.
Brandon Burton 40:11
It’s so important. It really is. Well, Brittany, this has been a great discussion. I’ve had a lot of fun learning from you and and learning about these programs you guys are implementing and really making a difference there. And Eugene, so thank you for spending time with us today. And I wish you and your staff Best of luck as chamber the year.
Brittany Quick-Warner 40:31
Yes, thank you so much for the opportunity. I appreciate it.
Brandon Burton 40:34
If you are a chamber professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple podcast, Google podcasts or Spotify. When you subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast new episodes will show up in your podcast app each week as they are released. If you’re finding value in this podcast, please leave us a rating and a review in iTunes. But most importantly, please share Chamber Chat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry.
Have you ever thought about creating a podcast for your chamber? We always hear about how chambers need to be storytellers. What better way is there to tell the stories of your members and the work of your chamber than through a podcast?
Your audience is waiting to hear from you as a convener of leaders and influencers champion for business and catalyst for change within your community.
I just launched a Chamber Podcast Course with the goal to get your very own podcast started within 30 days. Visit chamberchatpodcast.com/pivot. To learn more and to enroll in the chamber podcast course today. For a limited time as a launch promotion. This course is being offered at a 25% discount. Be sure to purchase the course today to lock in your savings before the price goes up., even if you’re not ready to start right away. Again, that’s chamberchatpodcast.com/pivot.
