As the old saying goes “if you have seen one chamber, you have seen one chamber.” I understand that every community has different needs. They are different sizes and have different problems. They also have different things that make them uniquely great. I often wonder about the confusion of business owners who belong to multiple chambers.
Hypothetically, a business could be a member of a larger, more robust chamber that has multiple events each week and several ways to educate and market their business members. This same business (maybe a secondary location) could also be a member of a more rural chamber who has a totally different vibe. Both chambers are doing what they feel is best for their community. However, this hypothetical chamber member is having a very different experience with each of these organizations.
Common Member Experience
One way that every chamber could offer a similar experience for each of their members is through advocacy. Many chambers claim to be the voice of business for their community but what does that mean? Do their members know what that means for their business?
Some chambers tend to shy away from jumping into the advocacy arena for fear of offending people. They may worry about losing funding from a city contract or a large sponsor. Some worry about losing members because of the chambers stance on a topic.
Advocacy Creates the Voice of Business
If chambers could agree to represent the voice of business in their communities by promoting pro-business candidates and policies, then their members would better understand the value that they get from their chamber. They would understand why the chamber is branded as the voice of business.
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During election season, I have seen chambers invite local candidates to be interviewed on the chamber’s podcast. This provides a platform for residents to hear the ideas each candidate offers up, especially as it relates to business in their community. (If you are interested in starting a podcast for your chamber, see my free resources at chamberchatpodcast.com/pivot.)
I really like the idea of chambers in the same region banding together to support certain causes. This way as you advocate at your county or state levels, you can leverage the numbers of businesses who feel a certain way about proposed legislation that would impact their business. You can do this type of advocacy on your own, but a regional effort carries a much larger impact. This could even be taken to a national level as you bring chambers together across your state, province, or territory.
Advocacy Examples
I recently did a podcast interview with Marc Cohen, Chief of Staff at the Greater Rochester Chamber in New York. Marc offered up a great tip that may serve you well with your advocacy efforts. He suggested rather than trying to meet with the elected official, it is very effective to connect with a member of their staff instead. It is often easier to get a meeting with one of the staff members than it is to sit down with the elected official. If you can successfully create a relationship with the staff member, then you can create a great advocate on the inside.
When I visited with Roy William, and Brad Hicks on Chamber Chat Podcast, they both mentioned the great value of their chambers having political action committees. Setting up a P.A.C. requires more commitment and legal help but it can also become another source of revenue for your organization.
Here is a list of some ideas of ways to incorporate advocacy at your chamber. You may be doing some of these things already, and this list is not exhaustive by any means.
Learn about proposed legislation, taxes, regulations, or expiring regulations.
Talk to your business community/take polls about the expected impact of these proposals.
Look up who all of your local, county, and state elected officials are and start introducing yourself and your chamber to these leaders and explain who you represent. Write them each an email of encouragement and optimism of working together with them to represent their constituents in your community.
Coordinate letter writing and phone campaigns to show support or displeasure for certain proposals.
Organize or join a group on a regional or state level with other chambers to leverage your numbers.
Interview candidates in a forum to share their views to inform voters.
Endorse pro-business candidates and policies.
Consider creating or supporting a political action committee.
Summary
Your chamber does not need to set up a P.A.C. to make an impact advocating for the businesses in your community. But you should be doing something to make the voice of business heard in your area. I would encourage you to not let fear deter you from standing up for what is right for your business owners, their employees, and their families. Hold public forums, conduct interviews on your chamber’s podcast, YouTube, or Facebook page. Conduct polls to get real feedback from your business community. All of this will allow you to collect the information you need to help pro-business policies and candidates thrive in your community.
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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Marc Cohen. 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.
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Brandon Burton 0:00 This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Voiceover Talent 0:14 And now your host. He is happy to see so many conferences going back to in person. 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, where it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your members and your community.
Matt Morrow 0:47 Holman Brothers provide a great training for our sales team in terms of just outstanding sales techniques. But maybe even more importantly than that, they were able to provide us with a system a process that was repeatable, and in that we’re able to see very clearly from one month to the next how the how the pipeline is doing, what prospects are in it, what kind of progress we’re making and what we can do to coach people to success.
Brandon Burton 1:09 You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting HolmanBros.com.
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Guest Introduction
Our guest for this episode is Marc Cohen. Marc is the Chief of Staff at the Greater Rochester Chamber in New York. Marc became the chief of staff at the Greater Rochester chamber in December 2018. In his role, he directly oversees government relations, Legislative Affairs advocacy, and as the primary policy adviser to the Rochester chamber CEO Robert J. Duffy. Marc is charged with identifying process improvement opportunities, best practices cost saving measures, working with partners to promote and enhance regional workforce and economic development efforts. Serving as Mr. Duffy’s and the Rochester chambers representative at outside forums, and on community work groups and overseeing the daily operations of the chamber executive office. Marc serves on a variety of boards in his community. He also serves as an EMT with Brighton ambulance and as a 2021 Rochester Business Journal 40 under 40 recipient, Marc grew up in Amherst, New York, and graduated Summa Kumada from the University of Alberni. While at the University of Albany, Marc worked as a research fellow in the Office of the Provost, and co authored the book diversity at college real stories of students conquering bias and making higher education more inclusive. The book was named as a finalist for the 2020 foreword indies award, and was chosen as a silver winner of the 2021 distinguished favorites of the independent press awards. That Marc, I am happy to have you with me today on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love to give you an opportunity 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 better.
Something Interesting About Marc
Marc Cohen 3:03 Well, Brandon, I want to thank you for this incredible podcast that you do. I’m a fan of yours. And I think that your efforts to connect chambers of commerce and staff in this way is really outstanding. You pretty much took all the wind out of my sails with that bio, there’s nothing else about myself. That’s it. I mean, I I’ll tell you, I sat behind Contestants Row at the prices right and I shouted out answers, you know, to the to the contestants, as they were guessing and for our show, the one that we were that we were at when it was recording. The person went all the way to the to the big prize and they won they won the whole show. So I guess in some way, that’s that’s an interesting fact about me.
Brandon Burton 3:39 Did they invite you on their vacation with you too, for helping them out?
Marc Cohen 3:43 You know, you know, they didn’t and they also want a boat and I haven’t gotten a trip on the boat yet, but that’s alright, I’m not too sour about it. There were only like 1000 Other people shouting things. Alright.
Brandon Burton 3:53 So fun fact on prices, right? Totally off topic, but it’s pretty cool. My wife’s uncle was on prices right in the late 80s. And he won the whole Showcase Showdown. You know, the car the whole that is so cool. Yeah, the whole thing, the whole shebang. And that Bob is just about four months ago, he was on it again. And did it again. He won the all Showcase Showdown for a second time. It was like 28 years later, some 30 years later. I don’t know what the exact timing was. But the whole thing was to cars and the trip and boat and everything the whole shot. So it was pretty cool. They were showing his footage from the 80s. And he was on it. And in the 80s I think when he spun the wheel, he got $1. Exactly. And then this second time I think he ended up with 90 cents but still, yeah, he’s got the special touch but that’s you got that.
Marc Cohen 4:49 He’s got that special quality. That’s a great I think I can’t think of a better way for you to start your show. Isn’t that
Brandon Burton 4:54 Yeah. Totally unrelated but it’s fun. So tell us A little bit about the Rochester chamber is the size location budget staff just to kind of give us an idea of kind of the perspective you’re coming from is when are discussions for today?
About the Greater Rochester Chamber
Marc Cohen 5:11 Sure. So Greater Rochester Chamber is a Metro Chamber of Commerce. So we represent the nine county Finger Lakes region in upstate New York. Your listeners probably know the Finger Lakes for its outstanding wine. And we are known for many, many other things as well. But we are larger Chamber of Commerce, we have 1300 members. We are located our headquarters, our physical building is in downtown Rochester, New York in the in the sort of urban core. And our staff is about 30 people. Something unique about our chamber is that we’ve got the chamber of commerce side. So we’ve got our membership office and the Communications Office and the policy office and you know, those folks, but we also have a staffing division, and a screening division. So a member calls us and says, Hey, I need 50 temporary employees, we hire them as our employees, and then we we sort of staff them out to the various folks who need them. So in that way, we’re sort of our for profit size as a staffing agency. So that’s known as RBA, staffing and screening. We also do background checks for, for employers for tenants for tenant screening. And we have found that it’s a great way to what to earn revenue so that the chamber can continue doing the great things that we do. But it’s also a really great service to to the community at large, especially at a time, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this a little later. But when, at least for us, the number one issue we hear from, from business leaders is access to talent. So we can say not only do we support workforce development and talent, strategy and theory and you know, by supporting various initiatives, we are literally doing it every single day, we’ve got placement specialists who are putting people in jobs, supporting our members, supporting businesses in the community, in the most direct way possible. So our chamber is a full service Chamber of Commerce. And you know, we are we’re really proud of our membership and our staff loves what, what they do. And I certainly love what I do.
Brandon Burton 7:12 I love that idea of of having the staffing agency there on hand to really give that support to your members. That’s a great idea. And hopefully one that other chambers can think hey, that’s that’s good idea. Let me explore that. Yeah. So is it all full time employment placement? Or do you do temp arrangements at all? Or how does that set up?
Marc Cohen 7:35 It’s great question we do. And by the way, you’re helping me out because our director of staffing services is going to love me for this for this free publicity that she’s getting in her team. But no, we do. We do temporary placements, and then a lot of temp to perm. We do direct placements to so for the higher level C suite officials, C suite officers or middle management level officers, we will place them directly. And it’s you know, it’s interesting, like I said, it’s our VA staffing and screening. And if you look at our website, see the jobs that are posted. I mean, we post for veterinarians and dieticians. And, you know, and then the day laborer, you know, sort of manufacturing jobs and everything in between. I mean, it’s crazy, the, you know, the scope of the folks who reached out to us, we do a lot of work with our healthcare systems, in helping them to place to place workers, which again, in the wake of COVID-19, has been crucial. And so it’s, it’s every level of employment every length of time of employment. And, and it’s it’s a really, really impressive operation that that our team leads and again, folks are finding that, especially now before it was great, and it was important, and we, you know, did a lot of good in the community. But especially now, when COVID-19 has, you know, wrought havoc on businesses in every way be able to sort of be a one stop shop to help them to recover and build back stronger. Is is outstanding.
Brandon Burton 9:05 That is a very unique offering that you guys have there. And we could we could spend the whole episode diving in deep on it and maybe we will in the future. I think that’s a great, great topic to dive into. But for our discussion today we’ll focus more on the role of chambers it as it comes to advocacy and policy. And we will jump into that discussion as soon as I get back from this quick break.
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Alright, Marc, we are back. So as we look at the role of chambers in advocacy and policy. I know some chambers are a little hesitant maybe to get their feet wet in this topic in this arena. But I’d love for you to kind of take from your perspective how you add this to the value proposition there in Rochester. And keeping in mind, you know, the chambers listening who maybe don’t have a formal role in advocacy, how things can apply to them and how they can get involved in in advocacy and policy in their communities?
Marc Cohen 12:18 It’s a great question. And it’s an excellent topic, and you’re going to probably have to cut me off 10 or 15 times because I can talk for hours about sort of the role of this, but I’ll do my best, you know, I know brevity is key. So the role of chambers in advocacy and in policy is is one that might not be immediately obvious, but but is really interesting. And it’s something that any chamber can do. So as a Metro Chamber, we have members who join and our membership team is second to none. And they’ll be asked why do you want to join? You know, what, what is interesting to you about the greater Rochester chamber and sometimes people say, You know what, I just I really want to do networking events. And I want you know, the spaghetti dinners in the, you know, the, you know, go out to a bar and get a drink ticket and just kind of chat with people. And that’s an amazing sort of role of a chamber of commerce, it’s not really what we do. So we have something like 30 to 40 local chambers within our footprint. And we have no problem. And you know, our membership team, like I said a second to none, but they’re also just remarkably ethical. They have no problem saying, You know what, that’s not really what we do, right? We don’t do those weekly mixers. And we do it every once in a while, but sort of what the what your mainstream chambers will do. So we will refer them to wherever town or city they’re in, will refer them to their chambers and say, Hey, we have great partnerships with these local chambers, definitely join them, because that’s sort of what you’re looking for. When people approach us and say, look, the reason I want to join is because I need a voice to help me advocate for a policy that would be very helpful for my business, or advocate against the policy that would be detrimental to my business. It’s sort of one of our wheel houses. And and I’ll talk a little bit about that, you know, when at the state, county, local, or other state county, you know, and local levels and federal levels, we are approached about a policy issue or about, you know, a particular statute or you know, sort of red tape bureaucracy that adversely impacts a business or that will support a business. We have the relationships to help right and, and legislation can be daunting legislation can can be difficult to read. legalese is not, you know, is not always the most reader friendly. But the spirit of the legislation is probably well known, and chambers of commerce are incredibly well positioned to advocate for or against a policy because of who they represent. They represent a constituency that would be impacted by that policy. And so, I’m going to end my rant on that first question here and just saying that, you know, while we are lucky to have a staff that can, you know, read through pick apart And then you know, establish advocacy plans based on individual pieces of legislation or based on legislation packages, any local chamber of commerce with even just an all volunteer staff, all volunteer board, one part time staff, they can come together with their businesses, and submit a letter to the legislature, to the governor, to the county executive to the mayor, and just say, hey, look, we know this legislation is out there, we don’t want to 100% know, every aspect of it, but I’m telling you that based on what we do know, it’s really harmful, or it’s really helpful. And we, you know, we want to use our voice to, you know, to speak in favor or against against that policy. So, I got all wound up there, Brandon, I’m sorry, no, it’s gone. The introduction to it is so
Brandon Burton 15:43 in a couple of different thoughts on this, so I had Brad Hicks on the podcast back in episode 143. From Oregon, and he was talking about advocacy and, and how important it is for chambers, really of any size to to advocate for pro business policies, pro business candidates, and, and I know it can be a sticky topic for some chambers. They don’t want to get into it because they don’t want to offend anybody. But being able to look at had a policy and say this is going to help business or this is going to hurt business based on those constituents that you’re representing, I think is so important and vital. Do there at being a Regional Chamber, do you guys work with some of the smaller local chambers to help gather support and input from their members to take to the state level or national level? In some cases?
Marc Cohen 16:40 We do. And you brought up a point, I’ll answer that question. And I want to go back to the point about sometimes it getting sticky, because it’s really important. And maybe some, you know, some tips of how to navigate that. But we do so we created the greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce created something called the Advocacy Coalition of Rochester area chambers. So it’s at crack, which is just the, you know, an acronym we sort of put together. And we started it as just a super informal gathering of local Chambers from actually the Finger Lakes region and the southern tier. And Rochester just being sort of a larger city in our region, we chose to include that in the name for for advocacy sake, and sort of to catch the eye of elected officials. But what started as a super loosely, sort of arranged group of people talking about policy turned into a real advocacy group. And so we will hear from, you know, one of our local chambers, and I don’t want to shout out names, because there are so many, they’re also grateful to hear from a local chamber, who said, hey, you know, what we’re hearing from a lot of members, that exe is a real problem. And then another local chamber will chime in, in the email and say, You know what, we’re hearing that too. So we’ve got five or six, and rather than a chamber with 87 members, or a chamber with 112, or chamber with, you know, 500, we can all come together and say, we represent collectively 1000s of businesses, we are opposed to this, we are supportive of this, this will hurt, this will help. If this will hurt, here’s how you can adjust it, here’s how you can tweak it, and we’ve made impactful change. I mean, legislators reach out and say, Hey, we saw your letter of support, we saw your letter of opposition, you know, what can we do to make this better what we do to help get this passed. And it just, it’s really cool that sort of that we were able to do that. And I say we not the greater Rochester chamber, but we the coalition of you know, of the, you know, 15 to 20 active chambers involved in the group. So that’s been a really great thing and a cool way, maybe for Metro chambers who are listening or State Chambers who are listening to engage the more sort of local grassroots, you know, organizations regarding the stickiness. Oh, go ahead.
Brandon Burton 18:52 No, I was just going to just mention that hopefully, most smaller chambers are part of some regional or state coalition, as far as advocacy goes, just to voice a opinion of their members. I hope that’s happening. But I wanted to put a little bit of attention on this, because I know, there’s been a lot of turnover in the Chamber Leadership in the last year or two. So if somebody is new to chamber work, and they need to get their feet wet, NAFTA See, that’s a good way to do it is to find out on a regional level or state level, is there, an organization that you can, you know, tag on with and be a part of to help represent the businesses in your community? So thank you for talking to that.
Marc Cohen 19:34 No, it is and you know, I’ll say we, as you know, a Metro Chamber are part of the Business Council of New York State, that’s our state chapter and my boss who we have a little bit of an advantage in terms of advocacy. My boss served as Mayor of the City of Rochester and then it Lieutenant Governor of the state of New York. And so the relationships that he’s been able to forge have been helpful for our members and, and for the region as a whole The various boards that he sits on help to shed light on issues that are critically important to the entire regional economy. So we are privileged in that way. You know, but But to your point, you know, he sits on the Business Council of New York State’s board, he sits on the council of 100, for the US Chamber of Commerce board. So, you know, we understand the importance of connecting to our larger associations, right, affiliating with our larger, you know, parent, if you will, parent organizations. And, and we agree that, you know, local chambers, should engage with Metro chambers, and there ought not be and I know, there are, but there ought not be turf wars in terms of who’s got the members and who’s collecting the revenue, but rather, recognize that we’re all in this for the same reason, the spirit is the same. Sometimes the capacity is just different because of the various, you know, financial or resource, you know, positions that folks find themselves in. But no, I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Brandon Burton 20:53 Yeah. So go ahead and touch on the point as far as it being a Sticky, sticky topic for some people to to wander into.
Marc Cohen 21:03 It’s such a good question. And it’s one, you know, with which we’ve grappled as well. So advocacy comes in many forms, right? So there is everything from you got a chamber that’s got 46 members, and, you know, their dues are $25 a year and their dues dollars go to, you know, one annual letter and maybe one dinner, great. And that’s, that’s a perfectly great way to set up a chamber of commerce. And they can advocate just like any other can, by doing something as is, you know, seemingly simple as writing a letter making a phone call meeting asking for their local town council member or county legislator supervisor, you know, for a meeting state legislator, to discuss an issue that’s important. And then obviously goes all the way up to having a political action committee. So the Chamber of Commerce has a political action committee, which is not part of the chamber, right. It’s a separate entity. But you know, so we don’t have, you know, a majority of our board members on it, it’s it’s sort of an independent body, our CEO is not on it, there’s no chamber staff representation on the committee, but it bears our name. And our members support it, and our members contribute to it. And our pack interviews and endorses candidates. And so that’s just political, you know, as it can get right where you’re interviewing. And we’re bipartisan, we endorse Democrats and Republicans proudly. And, you know, and interview based on issues versus based on party. And we’ve got really diverse and great representation on the pack, to ensure that the voice of large and small businesses, that’s the voice of diverse businesses and minority and women owned businesses and veteran owned businesses, that all of that is brought to the table. But it is still inherently a political process to political action committee. So. So you know, we’ve we’ve gotten, you know, from time to time, questions about how you maintain relationships, and it’s a, I say, simple answer. It’s by conducting interviews and conducting endorsements and an ethical, fair and honest way, which we always do. And it’s by ensuring that, you know, you maintain a degree of separation, where, you know, our staff is advocating for members based on the feedback that we get, we get an email from a member saying, Senate Bill x is going to be really, really helpful for us. And we’re hoping you can help us to find a state assembly sponsor, and that you can help to advocate to the Governor to sign the bill. That’s great. And then we put together memos of support. And the same thing is if it’s opposed, working with, you know, our federal representatives, and Senators Schumer, and Gillibrand, and congressmen rally, you know, who represent us on the federal level and letting them know where we stand on various issues, where our members stand on various issues. It’s not rocket science and legislation and government is so again, daunting, and it’s, you know, can be wrought with bureaucracy and red tape and confusion. But if you kind of push all of that aside, and realize, wait a minute, this is just an issue of, you know, another mandate on businesses, I don’t know. And I don’t know the history of it. I don’t know the future of it. I don’t know who’s in favor who’s opposed. I don’t want any of that. What I know is that I have 46 members, and that one of them, or four of them, or all of them don’t like this new mandate. It’s my job now to go out and call my legislator and just say, Hey, I don’t have a big operation. But I’m telling you that my membership is opposed to this. And, and the impact that something like that can have is so massive, and that’s not political at all. That’s not sticky at all. It’s not because a Democrat or Republican, you know, proposed it, it’s because it’s a helpful or a harmful policy, and you’re doing what your membership wants you to do.
Brandon Burton 24:39 That’s right. And if you can imagine, you know, a handful of chambers across the state calling their representatives saying this is good or bad for our business, that it gets the attention of those elected officials who are representing you. That’s right. That that’s really what it boils down to. I think we’re people tend to shy away from getting into the politics side, because they feel like they might lose certain sponsors, certain members, if they endorse, you know, one policy or another. And really, it just it comes down to what’s what’s going to be best for business is what it really boils down to.
Marc Cohen 25:19 It does. And if I just had one more piece of advice, I would I would offer this there is a school of thought that in order to successfully advocate, you have to hold a press conference, you have to pound your fist on a podium, and you have to yell at people and be angry, and, and, you know, call people liars. And, you know, you’re a liberal, you’re conservative, you’re terrible, you’re awful we Stanford’s, and you know what you might get some really good press out of that every outlet in your community or in the state might come and listen to you. And that’s fine. You know, my boss has a saying that politicians have a memory of about 30 to 40 years, you know, if you offend these elected officials, they’re not going to forget, you know, maybe in 40 years, they’ll forget, but they’re not going to forget, if you try to make something political, if you try to embarrass them, or force them into a corner, it’s not going to go well. But if you write a letter you’re being you can have a strong language as you want. You write a letter, you send it to them, you don’t then post that letter on Facebook or Instagram or, you know, other social media, but rather send them the letter, you know, ask them that you’d like a response, and have a conversation with them sort of behind the scenes behind closed doors, where you’re advocating in the best interest of your constituency, but you’re not doing it in a in a, you know, in a way to try and garner attention, you’re doing it in a way to be constructive and productive, you will be successful. And even if I say you’ll be successful, because even if you don’t get your way on that piece of legislation, that elected official or that, you know, leader in their, in their office, the staff member will appreciate that you didn’t try and embarrass them or try and force them, but rather just tried to have a dialogue and in the future, eventually, you will absolutely, you will absolutely, you know, get wins. And they’ll start to look to you for advice on policies so that you can get in at the ground level and be proactive versus reactive.
Brandon Burton 26:59 I love that. And I think by approaching it from behind the scenes behind the closed doors, it’s a way where even if that elected official has some kind of preconceived notion of what the chamber represents or what they do. It really takes it to more of a level ground, kind of that same center, where you’re not in there to play politics, where you’re saying this is what’s best for our organization for the members of our chamber. And it really takes the divisiveness out of out of politics. So I love that typically,
Marc Cohen 27:31 right? Yes, exactly. Right. And, you know, I don’t know how we’re looking on time. But I have one more I have one more suggestion if we have time
Brandon Burton 27:38 for Yes, please.
Marc Cohen 27:39 So there is a lower there is an attractiveness to meeting with the principal right to meeting with the governor and the lieutenant governor to meeting with the Congress member to meeting, you know, with whomever it is right, because you want to be in front of them. I worked in Albany, I worked for my boss when he was lieutenant governor, I worked for our now Governor Cathy Hoko, when she was lieutenant governor, I have seen how advocacy works firsthand. These elected officials, everybody from our state assembly members to state senators, to county legislators, they are taking meetings like crazy, they meet with so many people in a day, you get your 10 or 15 minutes. And I’m not saying they’re not listening to you because they are and I’m sure they care, and I’m sure they’re great. But in order to be effective, you don’t have to meet with the principal. In fact, I would say that when I advocate, I often get further by meeting with their staff, their chief of staff, their legislative director, or legislative assistant, you know, a constituent Relations Director, because these are the folks whose job is day in and day out to be behind the scenes to be the person behind the person to help them get things done. So whereas you’ve got the principal who absolutely takes time to meet with constituents, but also has to take time to vote on bills, and also has to take time to do media and do fundraisers and do all of the other sorts of things that they have to do. If you can get in the ear of a staff member, not only are they more likely to probably give it more attention again, not because the legislator or the elected official won’t, but because it’s the staff member sole job to do that. If you can get them on your side, if you can get them to see your way. You might get five or 10 minutes with them, you know, you might even get five or 10 minutes with the elected officials themselves. These staff members are what the elected officials 10 hours a day. So if you can get one of these staff members on your side and get them to support your position, they will hammer away at that elected official day in and day out until the official sees it the staff members way which is also your way. Right. So my piece of advice is ask for a member with a meeting with the member or the elected official. Do it absolutely. Because it’s great to get a picture and put it on social media and show your members what you’re doing. But don’t discount the importance of meeting with staff as well because oftentimes staff are the ones who can help you to get it done. And you’ll find a lot of success in doing that.
Brandon Burton 29:51 That’s right. And the thought that came to me with as far as meeting with the staff is if you can turn your advocacy efforts into creating an advocate You know, in the office there, the staff member that you win, you know, that’s awesome.
Marc Cohen 30:05 That is exactly where I’m gonna steal that now. So all of your listeners will know that I stole that from you. But that’s all right. But but others won’t that’s, that is a perfect way to put it. Yeah.
Brandon Burton 30:15 Well as we are kind of getting short on time, I do want to ask you what would be maybe one, I mean, you just gave a great tip, but I was asked for one tip or action item for listeners that they can do to, to help take their chambers up to the next level.
Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions
Marc Cohen 30:31 I want any chamber listening who’s not already doing it, to go on Google type in who is my representative, whatever the first, you know, the first site that pops up is click on that type in your address or the address of your business or your chamber. Whoever it says is your elected leader or the various leaders, pick one of them, send them a note, tell them who you are, tell them that you’d love to show that you are a resource for them the community that you represent businesses that you care about, that you care about sort of the future of the economy of your region, your city, your state, and see what they say. And I will bet you I bet you a cup of coffee next time any of your listeners are in Rochester, New York, and any of them who can prove me wrong. I bet them a cup of coffee in Rochester wherever they want that or glass of wine, that they will get a response. And not only do they get a response, but they’ll have earned a friend because the legislator, elected official staff member who responds to them will appreciate that they took the time to reach out. Hey, my name is Marc Cohen, I’m with the greater Rochester chamber. I value advocacy and I value my role in advocating for constituency, I’d love to talk to you about the state of the the economy, the state of the business community in insert city. Have a great day, Marc Cohen. Every one of your listeners should do that. If they’re not already. And I bet you they’ll find really, really great success.
Brandon Burton 31:54 Absolutely. It sets the table for good common ground and to be able to vote to establish a good relationship. I love that. Rafi right? Yeah. So yeah. As we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future chambers and their purpose going forward?
Future of Chambers
Marc Cohen 32:11 You know, you and I were talking about this a little bit, you know, pre show, I think we want people to understand the spirit and the value of chambers of commerce in the community, right? So not necessarily, you know, quantitatively what I get for this, I pay you $50? And do you send me a coupon for a cookie every year like, not, not like that, but understand that the value of chambers comes from who we are and what we do and how we represent businesses and nonprofits, and again, our members in the community. That’s what I would love. And I hope that you know, there are larger businesses who are headquartered in various cities who continue to appreciate that, you know, here, we’ve got paychecks, and Constellation Brands, and Wegmans and massive companies who very rarely need something from even a Metro Chamber of Commerce, but they believe in us in our mission and our spirit. So that is what I hope now, here’s the reality. I do believe not just because I’m biased, because it’s my portfolio. But I believe that the future of chambers especially now is in advocating for their constituents and advocating for nonprofits in the business community advocating for policies that will drive the economy. And the last thing, which you’ll have to have me back at some point, so we can talk about workforce development, but the role of chambers of commerce in talent strategy and helping businesses to find the employees they need, so that they can grow and expand and flourish within their community. So I think that sort of those things represent the the future of chambers and in a macro way. And by the way, I have to clarify the value of chambers in terms of networking, and, you know, a brand new business has just come to, you know, your state or your city or your county, they don’t know anybody, they’re looking to make connections, there is no better organization than a Chamber of Commerce to do that. Because they’ve got the credibility, they’ve got the relationships. So that is, it is always going to be, you know, for chambers to be a connector that will always be a role and responsibility. And we can never lose sight of
Brandon Burton 34:16 that. Absolutely. And I love that, you know, taking the role of advocacy and moving it forward in the future. And I think it’s for a lot of businesses just joining the chamber, they may not fully understand or appreciate that mission or vision that the Chamber has that greater mission. So you need some of those things and networking kind of things, some of those events, some of the things that draw people in initially until you can get them to see the bigger vision and and really see the the great work that a chamber can do. So I think that’s a great tip there. Marc, I wanted to give you an opportunity to put any contact information out there that you’d like for anyone listening that might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you guys are doing things that are in Rochester what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect?
Connect with Marc Cohen
Marc Cohen 35:06 So GreaterRochesterChamber.com is a great way I’m going to give you my my email address and really anybody listening who has any questions about this, if you’re looking for templates or sort of boilerplate emails or pass advocacy agendas that we’ve done, I would love to share so my email is Marc.Cohen@greaterrochesterchamber.com. And, and it’s not an empty offer. I was so honored that that you reached out to me to be part of your show, and to talk a little bit and I don’t take it for granted. So anybody listening should should feel free to reach out to me. And you should feel free to share my contact information if if folks
Brandon Burton 35:48 want it. So I will put it on our show notes for this episode, which is at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode 162 But Marc be ready for some emails from Chamber Champions they’ve we’ve got a very engaged group and people that want to learn and and further advance their communities. So I’m sure you will have people reaching out and asking for some of those templates and boiler plate boiler plates that they can use to further advance our communities that I would love to anytime. Well thank you for being with us today. You provided a lot of value, great perspective that I hope everybody can take and and help their communities move forward, strengthen their businesses and make sure that there’s pro business candidates and policies in place. So thanks a lot, Marc.
Marc Cohen 36:37 Hey, Brandon, thank you for doing this. Thank you for your advocacy and you wouldn’t be around for as long as you have been with as many episodes and incredible guests as you had if you weren’t great. So thank you for all you do and I look forward to keeping in touch.
Brandon Burton 36:50 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.
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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Richard Scully. 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.
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 wonders what local chambers can do to help resolve the national supply chain issues.
He’s my dad Brandon Burton.
Brandon Burton 0:24 Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.
Kris Johnson 0:50 Well, Doug and Bill at the Holman Brothers have been a key ally in growth for my professional career working at three different chambers, a local chamber, a regional chamber and now a statewide chamber. And they’ve been the ideal solution, whether it’s a comprehensive training program, whether it’s working on individual sales growth, quarterly check ins with the team, the ability to grow members has meaning more assets for the organization, more assets means we can do more things to serve our members. They’ve really been the perfect solution for us, a trusted resource partner and a growth partner for us all along the way. So hats off to Doug and Bill for their great success. They’ll be a great partner for you as they are for us.
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Guest Introduction
Our guest for this episode is Richard Scully, Richard is CEO and founder of Chamber Nation. Richard has a rich and extensive background in Process automation with many years in corporate infrastructure design, automation, and community advertising networks. His vast experience prepared him to successfully build Chamber Nation from the ground up. Chamber Nation is a national organization with projects in 40 States and Europe. That company uses innovative technology to provide chambers of commerce, merchants, groups and other business organizations to automate their workflow and economic processes. Chamber nation has received two Business of the Year awards, and has had a significant impact on chambers of commerce across the country. Richard contributes his expertise and time by working with Chambers of Commerce executives to better serve their members while working to increase membership. That sounds a lot like my goal here on the podcast, which is why we align so well. But Richard, I’m glad to have you with me today on Chamber Chat Podcast. If you would take a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better. All right,
Something Interesting About Richard
Richard Scully 2:51 well, hello, everybody. And thank you for this opportunity. Brandon really appreciate it. It’s been a long a long hall building Chamber Nation. It started out where I was CEO, founder of a company called tricep hiring systems that was built at 5 million in sales in Silicon Valley. And during the internet craze, I had Porsches and Mercedes drive up to my office and saw these highfalutin people come in and say Hey, Mr. Skelly, you know like your company. We want to buy your company and I was going wow. And they’re telling me enough, give me a stock. You know, you’re going to be a multi gazillionaire and be able to walk on the beach, the rest of your life and all those kinds of things and, you know, not traditionally used to that kind of environment. I unfortunately fell for it for almost all stock shortly thereafter, within a year actually I lost everything and going from the top after 10 years of building a company that serves some major corporations like KLA 10 core into it. Symantec Eunice’s, it was basically all gone and stock was gone. And I got very little cash up front. So I was in a situation where I still had to work and the dreams are over. So I called my father up in Northern California, I was in Silicon Valley. So my house went to Northern California, and I put my tool belt back on and I was helping him finish up a spec house and he intended to do that kind of work now and it was a shocker. You know, you go from the car in the suit and you know, the business meetings to you know, out in the cold or out in the heat and building a house with a tool belt on is pretty pretty different. So I was I tried to keep my head up but honestly I was you know, inside it, it hurt a lot to lose everything. So I was working out there and somehow Kainoa HF radio it’s a small little Christian radio station. We had a blare on on the boombox. Imagine that and Ron Trumbo, the the person that hung the station was interviewing a guy by the name of Paul Macbeth. And he was the chief for the executive director of the Quincy, California Chamber of Commerce. And I was listening to him and, and he started talking about what they did on a $26,000 year budget. And I was always programmed to look for a business model that appear to need some help, and then build an infrastructure to help that industry. And then hopefully people like it enough to buy it. And then you can build a company. So I had he had offered his cell phone number at the end of the interview, I got out my contractor pencil, I wrote it on a board. And I called him and I literally had lunch the very next day with him it morning thunder and Quincy, I remember this. And he was the nicest guy, he was a former manager of a Safeway store, very successful in Safeway did a lot of different things. And he just a terrific guy. And he’s very supportive. He understood what I’ve gone through. And he just started digging really deep. And I had asked him if I could work in his chamber, or just sit in his chamber and kind of listen to what what goes on in the chamber. He said, Sure, come on down. So it evolved from there ended up building an initial infrastructure, a very lightweight, one cobbled it up, basically just a wireframe to see if this is kind of with this help them and I went from there. And about two months into working on that, him and his wife asked me over for dinner, handed me a $50,000 check. And these weren’t wealthy people, either. This was out of their retirement. And they said, We trust you. And unfortunately, Paul passed away a few years ago, but his wife is still with the company. And we’re very good friends. And she’s always been very supportive. And so has Paul. So that’s how it got started, went to the top went to the bottom and been trying to crawl out of that ever since.
Brandon Burton 7:07 Yeah. Well, that is a good background there of how you how you got into this. Yeah. Why don’t you spend a couple minutes and let us all know a little bit about Chamber Nation, kind of the, the size of the company, the services you offer. Obviously, you work with chambers of commerce, but just dive into that for a little bit before we get into our topic.
About Chamber Nation
Richard Scully 7:30 Sure. So Chamber Nation is we serve hundreds of chambers throughout the country. And also we were invited into Europe. And so we serve Europe and also have installations in Canada, we are really focused on the chamber industry, we, for obvious reasons, you can see how was started. I work in the Support Center. Every day, I’m in the middle of support, I feel like I need to be there because that’s how I understand what is working, what is not working. So I can make adjustments because our mission is obviously to help everyone as much as we possibly can. And you know, we’re we’re listening or so I think the first thing is human nation is very much listening. We’re two platforms, one, not going to focus on the membership management side, but we have very robust management system. But we learned about seven, eight years ago, that there needed to be a change, because in my mind, the chambers of commerce have always been they’ve been out for over 400 years. And they’ve always been the publishing platform for a community. Of course, that was very different in the very early days, like a flea market, you know, providing scales and things to do trade. And then as you move up the United States, the concept of travelers going into a chamber lobby. Well, prior to that, you know, postcards and telephone calls and things like that, and then going to the Chamber of driving to the chamber lobby, asking for brochures, maps, and then we have the internet, you have Google and you have Bing. And honestly, I was at a conference that I ACC conference a number of years ago. And it had a pretty dramatic effect on me because I was listening to a breakout session. And I heard chamber executives saying, Oh, they just go to Google and Bing. And I just go, Oh my gosh, why don’t do that. Don’t do that. And I was thinking in my mind that you know, that’s true. But the fact of the matter is that you know it, it’s not there. I mean, they might think it’s there, but it’s not there. And I just knew that because I had a problem inside of gym relation. As a CEO. I was pretty upset because we had built a lot of very robust membership tools and I, honestly the usage rate was not good. It was terrible. It’s called member engagement. That’s what everybody seems to talk about. And there wasn’t anything that I could do to move to seemingly move the needle and get membership engagement and, you know, improve that, you know, the management systems was clicking away and doing its thing. And it wasn’t, that wasn’t the problem. It was really everything built inside there. For the member side, that was the biggest problem. So I, I realized that, that Google and Bing really didn’t even have the information that the Chamber executives were saying this about just they just go there. So I’m having an issue of member engagement, I was really trying hard to figure out how in the world to change this. And it seems like, if you put a 12 inch by 12 inch login button, on the screen of your chamber website, it would make a difference. So I had an idea, an idea was to go to ACC for three days, take a clipboard and walk around. Some of you might remember me walk around for three days, when I asked the question, may I ask, What technology do you use for your members? I said it in some kind of way. I don’t know if I said management system or membership system, or whatever it was. But anyway, irregardless of what the system was, that was Chamber Nation. Or if it was the latest and greatest mobile app from Silicon Valley, or some other management system, it didn’t matter, every one of us had the same answer, the result was 90% of the members don’t log in, and when they do, they might contribute a paragraph of inflammation. Well, when I left that conference, I was a static, I was so happy because I realized it wasn’t us failing and how we develop it was simply just a, just a general problem. So anyway, when I got on that plane had a clear sheet of paper. And I said, Okay, we’re going to rebuild everything from the ground up, and we got to figure out what we got to do. So one of the things I realized is that the one thing I know for sure is that chambers don’t have a lot of money. So whatever it was that we develop, it had to be very, very inexpensive, and had to be something that could be easily included in the membership plans, because chambers, they don’t want their members upsold. They really, they really don’t like that. So we developed the first of its kind membership services department, we have over 20 people in that department. Now it’s shared across the country by multiple chambers. So we have a full membership services department, I like to explain it this way, that there’s three words and Chamber of Commerce, you have the chamber, and you have commerce. So the idea being in building this is that our customers would continue to handle the chamber like they always do. I mean, we would never suggest telling them how to run their chamber. But we are going to run commerce. And so if we run commerce, and they run the chamber as a team, we can deliver some really amazing results to the members. And that’s what we, that’s what we built. And then one thing led to the next. That was the concept now we needed to create infrastructure to support that at a very low price point, we needed a lot of leverage to make this thing work. And I also didn’t want to make any mistakes. So I started what was called the chamber collaborative, I invited customers to participate, got feedback from a lot of chamber executives on a constant basis. I was very open and honest with him, I would call many of them and say this is what we’re thinking how we’re gonna roll this out, what do you think? Do we need to make any adjustments. And so it really was built from the ground up to serve the Chamber of Commerce Industry. Our whole objective in all of this was to build something to where even if the member wasn’t engaged in membership, that they would get a value back and writing on a monthly basis. So they would wonder at the end of the year, you know, should I renew? I got this report, my numbers are going up every month I’m I think I better really so the whole idea was really changed things around. So Chamber Nation has two systems in one a membership management system membership development system, and when they work hand in hand, it does some amazing things for the community and the chamber and most importantly the member.
Brandon Burton 14:48 Very good. So that does give some really good background about services he offer and how you guys came to be. And it’s always neat to see how people land in the chamber world in general, but then developing tools around that. It’s great to hear that origin story. But you alluded to what our topic for discussion is today, which is going to be membership management versus development. And we’ll jump into that discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.
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Topic-Membership Management vs. Membership Development
All right, Richard, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re focusing our topic today on membership management versus membership development. So as we look at those two different areas, how do you see that? How do you see management versus development? What’s the difference?
Richard Scully 17:48 Management is operating the chamber. And membership development is operating the commerce. And you really have to have two separate teams focused on each side of that equation. The membership management system obviously needs to be able to send information to the membership development system, you have new members. So when you have new members, it has to notify the commerce side that there’s a new member and a lot of things need to be done. So the management system is supporting the membership development system. And then when the membership development system receives its instructions, and things are done, then it sends notification back to the management system where the chamber lives, the Chamber staff lives and lets them know that this has been completed and this member is ready to be introduced to their new platform. And you know, all of those things occur. And it’s basically a way for the chamber to review everything that’s been done for the member and then they click another button to send out a notification to the member letting them know the chamber has completed their onboarding and click here to look at everything. Click here to work with your member assistant. All that type of thing has to happen between both systems talking. The objective really is so that the membership management system now has a tool that will communicate with members on a regular basis letting them know exactly how well the chamber has been able to promote their business. tracking things from telephone referrals to electronic requests for additional information. You have your reports that run on a monthly basis that come from the chamber to the member letting them know this is what we’ve done providing them reminders. This is how you log in with idea being that they’re much more inclined to engage when they start receiving reports, every month that something significant has been happening in on behalf of their business, and they get curious. So it’s really helped from the engagement point of view, but membership development is really the handle everything. Commerce related. Oh, yeah.
Brandon Burton 20:24 I was just gonna ask from maybe from that point of view, or bridging that gap from the management to development? What is the the training like with the onboarding of a new member to say, here’s how our system works, you’ll enter some information here, what does it chamber need to do on the front end versus when the system takes over and kind of sends those reports and keeps the engagement level up? What’s that, that bridge like?
Richard Scully 20:51 Well, that we look at that as our responsibility, we as a company, we have to deal with that. So one of the things that is very important in the whole process is that we do all of the research on the businesses, and we do all the development, all the membership profile pages, because although we’re our objective is to pivot a Chamber’s traditional membership directory, into a full blown publishing platform. It’s, it’s, it’s really important that you know that the work for the members are actually being done. So we do all the research, all the development, all the build out, you know, the catalogs or mobile applications or texting platforms, you know, all kinds of things or customer testimonial systems, their coupon management, which actually generates coupon booklet. So, we know that electronic coupons are cool, but they’re not used a lot. So what we’ve done is we developed that to where it goes from electronic to print automatically through our community coupon booklet, so that chambers have a tangible something to show and say, Listen, when you go when you do this, it’s not only going on the website, on your mobile app, and in your catalog, but it’s also going to the community coupon book, like another reason that we can kind of motivate them if you will, to get logged in. So they answer your question, we do that onboarding, research, onboarding, we provide all of the support unlimited at no charge to the members, so that it’s very easy to get support. But when they get these monthly reports, to show them exactly what is happening there, they’re motivated to get in and take a look. And we’ve just added the ability now for them to add video profiles. And all of this is designed so when they look at the dashboard, and they click on it, it’s just real self explanatory. We’ve been building a lot of technology for a number of years. And now we’re going to pull that back because we have so much. And we’re just going to focus on improving our training, we have a woman Her name is Rachel, she works at the full Shar Katie, Chamber of Commerce in Texas, she is going to be starting our new monthly zoom member and training. In she’ll be talking about that specifically from the point of view of the chamber, where they do a lot of classes. Now, you know, real estate agents use it differently than mortgage brokers and retailers. And that’s another thing with with the platform, when you’re building a marketplace for a chamber, it can’t be a store. And everything out there that sold is a store and the reason it can’t be a stores because I don’t think you’re going to find one attorney or one, you know, one real estate agent, nobody like that insurance is going to want to have a store with a checkout, you know, on it that does just doesn’t fit. So we had to build this to accommodate the 80%, which are service providers, and then the 20%, which are retailers with one switch, they can switch it into a complete commission free ecommerce platform. So another benefit of being a chamber member is that you get access to all these tools. So self explanatory, easy to use, all the setup being done is is critical for a successful platform. And I mean, even in the very beginning, you know, one of the stumbling blocks we had was, you know, calling the members to learn more about their business and we realize that people don’t answer their phones anymore. It’s almost impossible. So this has been a really hard model to figure out is it’s taken a long time, a lot of technology. We’re making slight adjustments all the time and the technology to make it smoother and smoother. But fortunately for our customers they don’t see See that part of it because we really are handling the commerce side. And although they have access to the commerce platform or the membership development platform, that’s really for us to use, but they have unencumbered access to be able to get into every business and to see all the stats and exactly what’s happening on the Commerce front. And we also have like for chambers that are going out for grants, we have community wide economic development reporting. And that’s really helpful because they can now generate reports on a community wide level, to help justify any grants that they get for, you know, their visitor centers or economic development, all kinds of different things. And we have several chambers that have actually no one grants.
Brandon Burton 25:48 That’s awesome. So there’s a couple of thoughts that came to mind as you were given this explanation of kind of how the software works in the hole bridging that gap. You had mentioned about roughly 80% of Chamber members tend to be more of the service providers and the other 20%, kind of the the retail shops and things of that nature. And you had mentioned, the ability to set up a an E commerce shop. So I know I’ve talked about this, especially through the pandemic, for those that had retail shops that didn’t really have a strong online presence, the important for chambers to kind of be that catalyst to help those businesses get their brick and mortar online. And the potential of selling out the back door more or less. Can you touch a little bit more on what that’s like for trying to get some of these brick and mortar retail shops online with the retail store and ecommerce platform.
Richard Scully 26:49 None of it is easy. I mean, first of all, most people are our most retailers are slanted towards not selling online, one of the things that we learned is that they have a real problem managing inventory, because they have a physical store, they have an electronic store. And if they run out of stock, then and someone buys it online, or they don’t go and take it down, which a lot of them don’t do, then you have a problem. So they shy away from that. One of the things that has helped though, is that what we’ve done is we’ve decoupled the merchant account, there is an ability to use PayPal, but we suggest that they don’t do it that way. And they use our integrated checkout request system. This way, when a retailer has products that they also sell in their store, when somebody purchases that product, it will send an order request receipt to the buyer. And it sends an order request to the member so that the member can now check inventory, and then complete the checkout on whatever terminal they currently use. Which makes it really, really easy because remember, we’re not in the middle of the transaction, charging a commission, we’re not interested in charging anything. This is a this is a member service, it’s included in membership, there’s no upselling. So it’s a very legitimate transaction. So since we don’t have to take a piece of it, then we can decouple the merchant account. And that works great. We also have inventory in the online version where they can put in like they could have 20 available in there and automatically click down until it goes to zero. And then what it does is instead of deleting the item, it puts it in hides it and puts it in the warehouse so to speak. So later on, you can unhide it, bring it back and put inventory levels back in. But it’s a simple in our platform, every every every catalog is full of what we call displays. And they are cataloged displays, because you know, your professional services, you know, catalog display as a store is is the appropriate nomenclature, I guess you would say. And all all a member has to do is begin to take when they open up those displays, they add more displays, they just simply put in a price and when they add the price, the whole infrastructure changes into a store. So and you know we like to say that Amazon is all centralized. So why not your own chamber community including the internet, including the professional service providers, and that’s exactly what’s happening because the Chamber’s always been the central hub of everything. And unless, you know if they don’t take the electronic side of things really seriously, then they’re really going to lose out and you know, it’s not something to celebrate, but in most communities today, local newspapers, you know, the subscriber levels are down and that’s not a good thing. I like traditional media. Local radio same kind of thing. I mean, look, podcasts are competitors to radio now a lot of different things. So I’m, we’re really positioning the Chamber of Commerce now to become the default advertising hub for each and every community across the country. And it works because we’re doing the work. And if you just put in technology, and I know this, because I asked a lot of questions, and it didn’t matter. You know what technology it was, the vast majority of people just don’t log in to anything. So you’ve got it, you’ve got to, you’ve got to deal with that. And that’s, it’s taken us many years and too much money to build everything from scratch all over again. But, you know, that’s what we had to do. And if I didn’t go to that ACC conference, you know, I would have never would have never understood the problem.
Brandon Burton 30:56 So that kind of hits on the other point that I wanted to bring up. As I’ve mentioned in a couple podcast episodes in the past, where I like to encourage chambers occasionally to do what I call the yellow highlighter exercise, where you look at your own membership list and take out the highlighter and markup, you know, all the members that have any level of engagement with the chamber. And oftentimes, chambers are no surprises the right word, but when you see it in front of you with the how low of a percentage of engagement for on any level, whether opening emails, responding on social media, attending a luncheon, whatever it may be, just to kind of have that pulse. And I do it from the perspective of, you know, for chambers doing their own podcast, it’s just another way to engage their membership. But what I like about what you’re, what you’re talking about here with the this platform, is it offers another way, and kind of reminders even for these members to be engaged, to be found easier online to allow the chamber to be a better advocate for their business, you know, based on their engagement. So I’m going to guess that your customers probably don’t need to pull out a yellow highlighter, you probably have a report, it’ll spit out whatever membership engagement level their members have. But I think that’s important for for chambers all over to look at what that engagement levels like further.
Richard Scully 32:25 Yeah, and you and you almost have to force it. You have to force a level of engagement in order to get them engaged. And I really believe in that. I mean, I had a you know, it’s it’s, it’s one of those things just recently, I was invited to come two days to Green Valley, Arizona, Green Valley, Sarita chamber, and they had some formal chamber member workshops there and, and they had me down and it was quite nice. And it was interesting, because, you know, the members are saying, holy cow, I never had any idea that the chamber was doing any of this, you know, and you’re overwhelmed with questions. And oh, it does that too. And they’re very excited because the chamber typically ranks pretty doggone high on search engines, they do really well with their websites. The directories do well, too. They do they do phenomenally well. It’s amazing. But people really do still use the chamber member directories. And I think it’s because it’s a dedicated local directory, unlike Google and Bing, where you’re going to get local results, but you’re not going to get something that’s like local, local, local, right. So people realize that, oh, when I’m connecting the chamber, I get all of that attention online. I’m getting backlinks from here, I’m getting backlinks from the director of getting backlinks from a catalog, my mobile app, I’m getting, you know, all these different things happening, that are helping to promote their business. A lot of people think of it as SEO, I don’t use that word very much. I like to think that if it’s on the internet, it’s going to be found. But if it’s not on the internet, it’s not. And in most cases, the businesses do not document their products and services at all. So it’s not even there to be found in the first place on Google and Bing. So. And when we add a new business, we’re adding about 10 to 12 additional pages onto the internet for each business, just as a starter point after that they can get into hundreds of pages if they’d like. So I think the the engagement is you’ve got to work to engage that member through a success story. And then when they see oh, wow, this thing seems to be working. They’re much easier to talk to about engagement. I know this because going to workshops, not only Green Valley, but others I was also in Texas, to where, you know, the members are like going, Wow, this is this is fantastic. And they have a new appreciation for the chamber, they realize that the Chamber has grown up and you know is with it and understands technology and understand support. And you know, that’s how that’s how you get it, how you get engagement moving, in my opinion, because that’s how we been able to get it moving.
Brandon Burton 35:28 That’s right. I know, we need to start wrapping up here. But I did want to ask you, if you might have one tip or action item that a chamber champion listening to do to maybe help lift their chamber up to the next level? Yeah,
Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions
Richard Scully 35:44 I had an experience many years ago, some of you may be too young to remember this company. But most of you probably will, it was called Kinkos. And I believe it’s a FedEx thinner now, and I was traveling a lot trying to build trying to build try step, the company I mentioned before, and I had a proposal that was do very, very important. It was a multi million dollar potential contract, and I ran into some problems on my computer. And I remember going into Kinkos, and the woman sat me down at a computer. And she showed me all these graphics files that were already pre installed. And I mean, they just treated me like the king. And I’ll never forget it. And I’ve always thought about, you know, the chamber, converting chambers into these little Kinkos support centers where when you walked into the chamber, because you’re trying to help grow your business, that they really are a one stop shop for helping you be successful. And I think there’s a lot of chambers that do things a lot a lot differently, but they offer great solutions the way they are. But being able to say listen, you know, the chamber is a one stop shop for everything to promote your business, I think is a is my suggestion.
Brandon Burton 37:04 All right. Appreciate that. So I’d like to ask everybody, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Future of Chambers
Richard Scully 37:15 I, I see Chambers as the digital platform. I see the chamber as the attention grabber from the internet to disperse, leads and prospects to its local business community. I see the chamber as the legislative action center, an organization that that surfaces the important local topics that local businesses need to know about. And I see them as an extraordinarily valuable digital hub of the future. That’s how I see it. I mean, some people might think I’m wack. But, you know, I really believe that so many things are moving to the digital side, that somebody in a community is got to be a custodian of local information. And the chamber has always been there for that. And I just believe that they should be there during this digital transformation that we’re just beginning when I mean, you know, we’re already thinking about Metaverse, right? We’re already thinking about how do you do crypto in a community? I mean, there’s all kinds of opportunities that are coming up ahead that that somebody is going to have to be the custodian. The trusted source of local information, as I call it, is the chamber so I see it as the digital connection tool the future.
Brandon Burton 38:45 I love that answer. And then the nice thing about looking at the future is nobody can ever say you’re wrong because there’s always a future. The first Richard, I appreciate you spending time with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast I did I wanted to give you an opportunity to put out any contact information for anyone listening who want to get in contact with you and maybe further explore some of these ideas that you shared and services Chamber Nation has to offer.
Connect with Richard Scully
Richard Scully 39:14 Yeah, thank you, Brandon. So email address. Well, first of all, ChamberNation.com is where you can find us. I always ask people to go to RichardsCalendar.com to find a time that might work for you for a meeting or you can call me just click the sales department option but it’s 855-Add-Members that’s our phone number 855-Add-Members and just click the sales department option and you’ll get me that there too.
Brandon Burton 39:48 All right, we will get this in our show notes for this episode should be found at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode161 but Richard this has been a fun conversation and hopefully one that kind of expands the thoughts and visions of those Chamber Champions that are out there listening. So thank you for joining me today.
Richard Scully 40:07 Thank you man. Appreciate it very much.
Brandon Burton 40:09 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.
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Chambers of Commerce have promoted networking opportunities as a key selling proposition to prospective members for decades. Many businesses are sold on the idea of networking events creating leads which will sustain their business.
What typically happens, and you can ask your members, is everyone comes for the happy hour drinks, and they bring their business cards, and they are super uncomfortable. They might stay for a little while with the hopes that the evening will take a turn for the better but ultimately end up leaving early. Oftentimes, they feel as if they were a target for other networkers to try to sell them the whole time. I know this is the case because I hear it from Chamber members everywhere I go. These members are so uncomfortable and disappointed with their lack of real connections made from these networking events that they stop attending all together. Once this happens, then one of the big outward facing benefits that your Chamber provides is no longer of value to these types of members.
As I meet with member businesses as I sell advertising for Chamber publications, I often joke that I feel like a bartender…everyone is very open to share their experiences with me (good or bad) about their Chamber. These discussions are very insightful and they have no idea that I host an industry wide podcast or that I write this blog, but their honesty is very revealing.
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Your Impact is Much Greater than Networking
Before I go any deeper into increasing the quality of your networking events, I want to make mention that I am a big believer in the positive work that Chambers do to strengthen and develop their communities. I believe that networking is often done because this offering is the easiest to explain to a business owner the value that the Chamber can provide for their business. It is a starting point!
If you can create a high quality first experience for your members, then it will be much easier for them to understand your greater mission. You will be much more successful at having your members catch your Chamber’s vision and join in with your cause.
Has your Chamber participated in leadership trips? Think of the connectivity that is created with group travel. You want to try to stimulate these connections among your members too.
So, how do you create a great first experience with networking for your members?
It Starts with an Invitation
I recently read a book by Jon Levy called “You’re Invited: The Art and Science of Creating Influence”. In the book, Jon explains that for years he has hosted very exclusive dinner events. He invites people from all walks of life, who have never met each other to his home. His guests only use their first names as they converse with each other. They also prepare the meal, eat, and wash the dishes together. At the end of the evening as these groups of individuals have created and shared a meal with each other, and shared laughs and stories, they then go around the room and share their last name and who they are.
Jon has had olympic athletes, scientists, authors, garbage collectors, doctors, celebrities, coaches, influencers, and some of the biggest names in society as guests of his dinner parties. Once the true identities are shared, shock fills the room as the other guests learn who they have been sharing their evening and experiences with.
Jon has created an alumni group of all of his past dinner guests and he still brings them together and has built a rather large following with one invitation and one dinner party at a time.
Marjorie Hinkley shared a great thought “There isn’t a person you wouldn’t love if you could read their whole story.” I think this quote resonates well with the idea of truely getting to know a person before casting judgments or trying to sell them your products or services.
Imagine Your Networking Event
I believe that Chamber networking events could be done much better with more intentionality. I will share a thought of how this might look…
You could start by identifying a segment of your membership to focus on for a specific event. This could be those who are connected to the real estate industry, or hospitality, or tourism, or retail.
You look through your membership list and find some options for activities that this segment of members could participate in together. For example, painting at a board and brush member business or being taught by a chef at a local restaurant how to cook the perfect steak. You can and should get very creative with the event ideas.
Set some rules for the event to make it more into a game. It may seem counterintuitive, but one rule might be that you are not allowed to talk about your business for the first 30 minutes or hour. This will create some tension but it will also allow for the attendees to fully engage without the fear of becoming a target.
Create and send out physical invitations that create a little bit of mystery which will insight curiosity.
Assuming that the event goes well, you could solicit feedback and suggestions from your guests for future events for guests from other segments of your membership.
You could take this to another level by capturing some of these positive outcomes and testimonials that come as a result of your event to show how creative your Chamber is. This will show how much you really do care about being a convener of leaders and influencers in your community.
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Consider Diversity in your Segmentations
As you look forward to future events, I would encourage you to think out of the box when it comes to the segments of your membership. With diversity, equity, and inclusion being top of mind for so many, it would do your Chamber well to purposely think about who is not being represented. Most Chambers do well with segmenting and focusing on women owned businesses and young entrepreneurs. You could host an event for veteran owned businesses or black owned businesses. The key is to get the right people into the right room, while creating an experience that builds relationships beyond the superficial business card exchange.
Nobody likes to be sold to, but everyone appreciates being noticed.
Stronger Relationships Create Greater Purpose
I have a theory that has me believe that if you can create a high-quality early impression for new Chamber members, they will be more willing to hear what else you have to offer to support their business. This in turn will lead to higher membership retention and overall growth and these business owners tell others how great your Chamber is and why they need to join.
Just today, I had a Chamber member who is also an ambassador tell me that she invited one of her business neighbors to the Chamber’s annual banquet. The neighbor told her that they were not Chamber members so she replied by saying “Well, then you need to join. It is the right thing to do.” This Chamber ambassador then confided in me that she was so disappointed that she didn’t have any better reason to give this other business to join the Chamber other than it is the right thing to do.
Flex Your Influencer Muscle
Many of your members may not be completely convinced about why they are a member of your organization or how long they will continue to be a member. Once you can give them a solid, compelling, great experience, they will never have to question what they get from your Chamber ever again. They will also become an advocate for your organization if you create a believer out of these members early on.
We all understand the great power that comes with a group of like minded individuals who get behind a cause. Before a person can fully support a cause and join a group, they need to have a strong enough why. Chamber networking events are the visible, outward facing membership offering that most people can relate with. Now we just need to use a powerful enough hook to help them catch the Chamber fever.
What creative networking events have you tried? I would love to hear what you are doing and what works. You can email me at brandon@chamberchatpodcast.com to tell me your stories.
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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Patrick Shanahan. 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.
Hello Chamber Champions. Thank you for tuning in to Chamber Chat Podcast. I am your your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to help you better serve your Chamber members and your community.
Jason Mock 0:51 We brought in Holman Brother to help our organization go to that next level. And in those two years, our team has transformed the way that we think about sponsorships and non-dues revenue. And I would really encourage you if you’re looking to take your chamber to the next level to bring on the Holman Brothers.
Brandon Burton 1:01 You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting HolmanBros.com.
Doug & Bill Holman know how to diagnose and solve 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
Our guest for this episode is Patrick Shanahan. Pat currently leads the enterprise sales team at Glue Up. Pat’s responsibilities are focused around building a team of consultants tasked with providing full digital transformation for large scale associations and membership based organizations in North America. Pat’s consultative approach to SAS sales has enabled him to grow companies in the hospitality and technology space. Pat’s most notable accomplishment ranged from programs focused on revenue optimization and the hospitality space for some of the largest hotel groups to repositioning and building new teams within technology companies to starting and exiting a technology company of his own. Pat, I’m happy to have you with me today here on chamber chat podcast, if you would take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you better.
Something Interesting About Pat
Patrick Shanahan 2:12 Absolutely. Thanks, Brandon. And welcome, everyone. Thank you for having me, I guess I’d say something interesting is once upon a time, my mid 30s actually went ahead and quit a very lucrative job and just tried to start my own company. It’s kind of like the stars line I had, it was, it was the right time, I was actually still unmarried at the time didn’t have as many responsibilities in the scope of family. And man, my actual family was really just like that, they thought that my trajectory was going really well. And it wasn’t easy. I had, I totally lacked the resources that I needed to, to get it off the ground, I had Uber Lyft for practically a whole year and sort of simultaneously get my, you know, on the street MBA, so to speak. But, you know, ultimately was successful, it’s taught me a valuable lesson in faith. But I kind of call it these days, I don’t know if this is really a buzzword or phrase, but faith by intelligence, meaning that, you know, I like to have as much info as possible before taking a leap of faith. And I’m not saying that this is something that you do when it comes to, you know, religion or anything along those lines. But as a sensor, you can take, take as much information as you can before you take a leap. So it’s still a leap nonetheless. Because that’s something random but interesting.
Brandon Burton 3:33 Yeah, like that reminds me of the quote of Martin Luther King, Jr. About how it goes to the effect that you don’t need to see the whole staircase to take the first step. But you know, if you can see that first step and take that step with faith, and you’re on the right track. Well, why don’t you take a take a few minutes and tell us a little bit about about glue up? What is the company glue up? What do you guys do? What are your services? And then that’ll help set the table before we get into our discussion for today?
About Glue Up
Patrick Shanahan 4:05 For sure, well, it’s there’s kind of a lot to it. So I’ll keep it pretty simple. We’re a software company, you know, a SaaS company, a cloud based, you know, application with, with mobile apps, but at our core, we’re a CRM company that helps member based organizations manage, you know, their, their contacts, their members, their prospects or opportunities. And it’s sort of modular in its in its capabilities in terms of, you know, the membership management, you know, events, community engagement, it being app based it really, really what we do, it’s two things. So we try to kind of go in and discuss with our clients, how do we remove any manual processes here, this is meant to be sort of an all in one out of the box solution that can, you know, greatly enhance the full ecosystem. And the second thing that we do really is just drive engagement. So in a very segmented and relevant way meaning that it’s all about the data that you have at CRM level, how do you segment lists of of data segment your your people and then you know, drive real information and get them to engage you’re basically on a on a mobile app or on the desktop in a community sets. Awesome. So I mean, we see what that really does is it kind of certain things that we do like for example, our virtual speed networking, version two, which is a really cool, kind of putting the pizza lovers with pizza lovers and putting the the wings lovers with the wings, lovers, you know, you ultimately in a networking sense, hopefully what that does is drive perceived value into ultimate tangible value.
Brandon Burton 5:45 Yeah, and we can touch more on that in a in a moment, but I’ll introduce our topic for discussion today is going to be around the idea of creating more high quality digital assets for your chamber, to kind of diversify your digital outreach to your membership and your community in general. And we’ll get into this discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.
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All right, Pat, we are back. And as I mentioned before the break our our focus for our discussion today is around creating high quality digital content for chambers of commerce. And specifically, just to kind of give a heads up to everyone is I’m partnering with Glue Up for a special online podcast live event, if you will, with with glue up and we’ve got a panel as well of speakers that will be on this live digital event really focused on this whole topic. So today, we were hoping to kind of whet your appetite a little bit, hopefully to gain more people to join us for this digital development event.
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So Patrick, you had mentioned before that break about how you mentioned segmentation. So taking for example, a Chamber of Commerce to be able to segment their members. Can you talk a little bit more about what what you mean by that?
Patrick Shanahan 9:35 Yeah, for sure. Well, I’ll use the example of email to start with at least but you know, we all get hundreds of emails a day and many of them just aren’t relevant per se. You know, I get a lot that it looks like somebody just didn’t do their research when they’re trying to sell me you know, a sales enablement tool or something or, or data that they’re trying to sell. You know, because we’re a software company we need to acquire data so that we could reach out and, you know, what happens is like, Okay, we get, we’re getting the same even with organizations that I’m interested in or that I’m a member of, I’m getting stuff that’s just way out of my realm, it’s not necessarily truly relevant. And I don’t have time, unfortunately, all the time to, to dig in and just read all that. So one of the things that I like to talk about is how to really segment your your actual audience, whether it’s members or non members, especially the non members, because, you know, hopefully, members are receiving value Otherwise, they wouldn’t continue on. But the non members obviously are being a little bit more picky, perhaps they need some more value to be, you know, instilled in them, or you need to demonstrate that. And it’s really starts with, like, how you reached out to them in the first place. So, I hope that’s kind of a decent answer. But basically, that’s really just one of the probably five Pong endpoint. Yeah, concepts that I discuss on a daily basis for chambers,
Brandon Burton 11:00 that I’ve joked about this a few times. But my background is in chamber publishing, so doing advertising sales, for chamber directories, and maps and different things. And as I do that, I joke about that, I often feel like a bartender, you know, I meet with these Chamber members, and I hear, I hear their complaints, you know, with unmet unfulfilled expectations from their chamber, and so forth. And one of those things that I hear from Chamber members on pretty much a daily basis is how they get so many emails from their chamber, they just can’t even keep up with all the emails. So as you talk about that, just email as a example, the value that comes in segmenting your membership base, maybe as a starting point, to say, yes, there are certain things that every chamber member needs to know about. But there’s other things that maybe just the restaurants need to know about, or maybe something that just this service based industry needs to know about, or the retail, you know, so you can really hone down and you can get as niche as you want with the segmentation, to make sure that the messaging you’re putting out is relevant to those that you’re putting it out to. And then they also feel like you’re doing something for them, specifically, instead of just sending out a wide broad casting net, and hoping that you bring somebody in to the next event, you know, that your chambers doing. So I see a ton of value in being able to segment and in that that’s best done in a digital way, you know, and being able to input your data in a way that makes sense to be able to segment it later.
Patrick Shanahan 12:42 Totally. And then, you know, even on the front end, the marketing front end, you know, the chamber, I see pretty much every chamber just its sign up for a newsletter or something. Yeah, well, you can think through that one even better to you can actually maybe even have a little bit more of a segmented approach from the former facing, like, even in the initial pre membership phase, like signing up in picking sort of an industry segment at that point to receive communications from so
Brandon Burton 13:12 for sure. And then that gets takes us to the next point that I wanted to touch on is the ability to diversify our digital outreach. So I think every chamber out there has got email, most of them have some kind of social media. Those tend to be you know, we’re most chambers kind of a baseline, you know, they’ve got their Facebook, they’ve got email, but maybe what are what are some other examples that come to mind of other ways that they can reach out digitally to their membership base and and prospective members?
Patrick Shanahan 13:48 Yeah, absolutely. Well, there’s a few. Number one is that, you know, this is my perspective. So I’m not necessarily trying to be out here talking about technology, but you know, it’s, it’s an app based world now. And so, you know, we have the likes of the, you know, the Instagrams, and Facebook’s, and LinkedIn, those are certainly very important. However, none of those actually are enable you to truly do what we did in our last couple of thoughts, you know, to truly segment that and actually have it so that, for example, and with our product with with glue up the community engagement solution, you pull up in the app, and you’re privy to what you have sort of subscribe to terms of the topics that you want to hear about, and it works much like a social network. So you kind of you’re scrolling through but it’s all people that are like minded maybe or have the same challenges. And so again, it’s it’s like value driven there because you’re not you know, you ever scroll down forever and you just didn’t really scroll and scroll on most can’t find anything you really are interested in and so that’s that’s, like probably the main the main gripe, actually that I hear from her clients is that A is the same thing we were talking about where it’s like, yeah, we have trouble kind of finding our niche, but it’s because in this whole thing, and actually, I’m just gonna throw out that, you know, Scott Pleasance is, you know, is going to be on this podcast. And I’m super excited because he comes from this economic development mindset, that’s just fantastic. And so when we were designing the community engagement solution, you know, we pretty much worked with him on on understanding what that would entail. It’s very programmatic in nature, it translates very well to industry segmentation, special interests, economic development, so forth. So when, when you’re scrolling forever, on a social network, and it’s not very segmented, there are, of course, you know, channels and people that you can, like, they all work a little bit differently. But when we were designing ours, it was very focused on trying to trying to be able to satisfy, you know, the, whether it’s, you know, economic development, or if it’s topical in nature, industry segment in nature, I’d say that’s the number one. The number one thing in terms of expanding as reaches, so you know, you’ve got, you’ve got all the whatever social networks, you’re using us also, you should have something that can tie them all together. So we’re well integrated into all of the social networks that that you know, a chamber would have or that a member based organization would have. So that’s, that’s the other thing is that it’s got to be something that’s integrated, so that it can be done at scale, because it needs to be done at scale, because there’s a hyper focus on the delivery of the information.
Brandon Burton 16:37 Sure, yeah. So you drop Scott Pleasance name. So Scott will be joining us as a panelist on our the live digital event that we have coming up and this is going to be on February 24. So for all you be listening, kind of bookmark that save the date. And we’ll we’ll get a link out for you to register for this here in just a little bit. But also on that panel is we’ll have myself we’ll have Patrick, it will also have Izzy West. And I know a lot of you are familiar with Izzy between her her blog, the Izzy West and she does several YouTube videos and very involved with digital content creation and working with Chambers of Commerce now as a consultant to take on their their social media presence. But as we talked about diversifying digital outreach, you know, the, you’ve got your social media, you’ve got your podcasts, you’ve got blogging, you’ve got video, you’ve got, you know, all of the different social platforms. So being able to reach out to your members or potential members and meet them where they are, and being able to communicate with them effectively in the way that’s going to resonate the best with them, I think is so important, and why we’re going to have this digital event to talk about creating high quality digital content and the importance of it for Chambers of Commerce. So one of those things, Pat, that you mentioned with the with Scott is around economic development. And and we had talked beforehand about how really economic development is something that every chamber should be a part of to some degree. Do you want to touch a little bit more on that about some thoughts? I know Scott’s no expert on that, but maybe give a teaser?
Patrick Shanahan 18:28 Totally, totally. And yeah, I wish he was here. But um, you know, he’s, he’s, I’ll give you a little background. He’s he actually is from Lynchburg, Virginia, at least now in his life. So that’s down and in sort of, sort of the country, at least in my perspective, you know, because I’m from the DMV, the Washington, DC metro area, I’m in the suburbs. And he’s tasked with economic development, he actually his organization is called innovate Lynchburg. And that whole corridor is a place where he and his his board are trying to really think outside of the box in terms of how do we attract, you know, and educate new talent to basically get, you know, economic stimulus via bringing, bringing in organizations like I’ll give another example of Scott for a get back to it. But like, when you think about Fairfax County in Northern Virginia, and I actually live in montgomery county, which is on the Maryland side, Virginia is absolutely crushing it. I mean, they’ve got Amazon Web Services there. It’s already been there. They’re moving, they’re getting the HQ to how does that happen? There’s a lot of things in terms of tax incentives, server time and certain things like that. So a lot of that’s going on and a little bit of a smaller level out there. What he’s doing, but the the point is that, you know, whether we like it or not, and I never really realized this until I spoke with my CEO and this is actually a couple of months ago, and certainly when we had that conversation Two weeks ago, Scott, whether we like it or not, if you start a business, you’re you’re simulating, you know, economy, you’re developing the account, you’re creating jobs, opportunities, whatever we do, it’s all centered around that in a business capacity, and then our allies really, so he’s all about that, very cognizant about that. And he really, I think they started this tech hub in a more hyper focused way to try to get the tech companies that presumably, will grow fast, you know, and, and, and provide faster value, maybe that just any other industry segment out there is. So I think what they’re betting on to start, he actually, I mean, I’m not sure if anybody knows, but I mean, it’s in Virginia, it’s like, it’s like, if you get at a high school, there’s a program where they practically pay you to go to school, and they practically sign you up for the job of your dream career, that it’s a two or four year program. I mean, they made that happen out there. And that is fantastic. It’s having a major impact on lives out there. So hopefully, that’s a good summary of it. And I think it’s going to be epic, they’ll just continue to really, really do well.
Brandon Burton 21:12 Yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing what seeing what Scott has to bring to this digital event. And for those of you who who are interested, this is the the morning of February 24, that we’re doing this, this digital event for creating high quality digital content for chambers of commerce. And you can access it, probably the easiest way to register would be through the shownotes On this episode, which is chamber chat podcast.com/episode 160. And I’ll have a registration button there, that’ll take you to the page to get signed up for it. But Patrick, I don’t want to, you know, giveaway, everything that we’re going to be covering in this event. But I would like to have you, you come from a digital background for sure. Like to get your perspective on a tip or action items that listeners chamber champions can do to help take their chamber app to the next level.
Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions
Patrick Shanahan 22:12 Absolutely. Number one. Sorry, you said a tip, I have a few
Brandon Burton 22:17 that will take bonuses. I mean, we’ll charge extra for those for the list. No, I’m just kidding. Well, yeah,
Patrick Shanahan 22:23 me too. Now, obviously, number one would be attend this actual event coming up on the 28th. So for sure, register for that. And yeah, check, check out my website, go up.com. But with this series, you know, to, I think a really cool exercise to do would just be to create a list of all the small business businesses that are in your, you know, in your area, that are in your database or not. And that are, you know, they’re not member, take, take a small sample of this random. And, you know, if it’s, if it’s a ton of data, yeah, just take like maybe five of them. Hopefully, once maybe the, you don’t even really know, if you’re in a really, really small place, that’s probably going to be pretty hard. But go to their website, see if they even have one, see if it’s really out of date. We’re gonna chat about this just a little bit, probably, if we can get to it on on the event. But I mean, there’s some chambers that I work with, that are totally making money off of this type of strategy. And I think we spoke about this as well, really out of the box thought process and a really, really cool strategy that I think is, is on the economic development front, it’s on the, it’s on the, it’s on the front of chambers, you know, really spearheading the advancement of their members where applicable.
Brandon Burton 23:46 I think that’s so key, especially coming off the heels of the pandemic right now, where, when, when COVID first it and businesses you know, brick and mortar businesses had to close their doors for, you know, the two weeks to flatten the curve, or however long they ended up closing their doors for those who had a website who had a digital commerce, you know, presence, were able to pivot and actually still do pretty well, even through the pandemic. So I think that’s a great tip that that’s us offered is to, to take a look at, you know, a sampling of your members or prospective members and see, do they have a website do they have what kind of digital presence do they have? Are they operating just with a brick and mortar and a Facebook page? Because that’s not going to help a whole lot with SEO rankings are people trying to find them online? I know in fact, one of the sponsors for this show for the for chamber chat podcast is chamber nation. And they’ll they’ll help chambers do this or they’ll build out the number of web pages for their members. So it helps to with rankings with search engines help them to be found in a digital world that we’re now a part of. So I think that’s a huge Did that path just offer there’s to do that evaluation, and then look for the opportunity where you can help these businesses to get more into the digital world, just so they can stay relevant. We always talk about chamber staying relevant, but we need to help our members, businesses stay relevant as well. That’s a great tip. Tony, Pat, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers of commerce and their purpose going forward?
Future of Chambers
Patrick Shanahan 25:30 Pretty much what your last statement was, I mean, you know, chamber personnel, are some of the most diverse people they know, almost to a level of high granularity, you know, of not only their members, but they, they have the full idea of their area of what can be done, what can’t be done, the trends in all these different segments. And, you know, I think that, I think sometimes we we, we make the mistake of just thinking that someone knows their business, like 360 degree in and out, people are also very inundated with their lives to so a small business owner, and I’ve been with myself, is inundated by a hyperfocus of something, and mostly it’s revenue driven. Right. But perhaps, you know, one could actually kind of take a higher view, you know, back it out and say, Well, what is the risk involved? Potentially, and we saw it with COVID. You know, we saw restaurants like shutting down, you know, if they were able to pivot fast enough, would it have happened? So, having an idea of even like that, for example, they’re basically, you know, it’s it’s all about two things, the economic economic development, but also just basically being able to kind of be a consultant for, you know, all businesses within the area member or not. Yeah.
Brandon Burton 26:51 Which I know, can be hard as a bandwidth so wide. But there are certain things, I think it goes back to the segmenting, you know, if you can segment and share information to these specific groups, you’re not needing to do as much of the one on one stuff, but you can still do the one to many, it just may not be the entire base as many, but maybe it’s 15 or 20, in a group instead of 200 or 400. You know, it’s like
Patrick Shanahan 27:19 the glaring opportunity, you know, go for that, what can be done for everyone?
Brandon Burton 27:24 All types, but absolutely, yeah, yeah, go see where the biggest needs are, and attack those first. Absolutely,
Patrick Shanahan 27:31 totally. And maybe the other thing would just be to continue to focus early, because I know a lot of chambers is really great, but you know, use use the tools and the knowledge and the data that you have to truly put value to value within their relationships, you know, so finding people that, you know, be Cupid, you know, in a business sense.
Brandon Burton 27:53 Yeah. That’d be that matchmaker. Yeah. For sure. Well, Pat, what would be the best way for a chamber champion to reach out and connect with you if they want to learn more about glue app or anything that you had to share? And beyond joining us for this digital event on the 24th?
Connect with Patrick Shanahan
Patrick Shanahan 28:12 Sure, absolutely. Go to the website, glueup.com. Or you can reach me by email. patrick.shanahan@glueup.com. So that’s Patrick Shanahan. And that’s spelled s h a n a h a n at glue up.com. And we’re common. Well, that’s 443-282-8656. Happy to speak with you.
Brandon Burton 28:38 All right, we will get that in our show notes for this episode, which again, is going to be at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode160. And again, we invite everyone to join us for this digital event. Again, it’s going to be on the morning of Thursday, February 24. Depending on your time zone I’m in Texas, so I’m Central. So it’s 9am Central. So do the math to wherever you are, you’re located. But we’re going to have a great discussion on creating high quality digital content for your chambers and why that’s important. And again, I’ll be on that presentation. Patrick will be on there. Scott Pleasants and Izzy West. So we’re going to have a great discussion. There’s going to be opportunity for those in attendance to ask questions, get some live feedback. And we’ll also do some speed networking at the end as well so you can get to connect with some other Chamber Champions that are out there and be a part of this great event. So check out the show notes page again, chamberchatpodcast.com/episode160 to register for that event.
That Patrick, thank you for joining me today on chamber tap podcast, and sharing some of these key highlights and insights and, and helping to tease this event a little bit. We hope we get a great turnout.
Patrick Shanahan 30:00 I appreciate it. Thank you.
Brandon Burton 30:04 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.
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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Joe Henning. 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.
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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 loves hearing stories of listeners connecting with his podcast guests. He’s my dad, Brandon Burton.
Brandon Burton 0:21 Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast . I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.
Diann Rogers 0:46 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.
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Guest Introduction
Our guest for this episode is Joe Henning is Joe is served as the president and CEO of the Henry County Chamber of Commerce in Georgia since 2019. Prior to that, he served 14 years as president and CEO of the aurora Regional Chamber in Illinois. Joe is a 2009 IOM graduate he holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Public Relations and a master’s degree focused on organizational development from Northern Illinois University, as well as a certificate in nonprofit not for profit management from the University of Illinois, Chicago. He has served as chair of the Midwest Board of Regents in 2012 and 2013. In 2017, he served as chair of the National Board of Trustees for the program and continues to serve as a faculty member. He has taught on collaboration, industry forecasts strong chambers for the future, and marketing and membership in 2007. Under Joe’s leadership, the Aurora chamber received its first accreditation through the US Chamber of Commerce with four star distinction. In 2012, and 2017, he led the reaccreditation efforts and successfully achieved consecutive five star distinction. In 2015, the Chamber received chamber the year from the Illinois Association of Chamber of Commerce executives, as well as three star chamber of valor by Hiring Our Heroes, US Chamber of Commerce Foundation. In 2014, he was named chamber Executive of the Year by the Illinois Association of Chamber of Commerce executives, Joe supports and serves on the boards of a number of organizations that impact equity, inclusion, mental health, among others. I’m excited to have Joe with me today on the podcast, Joe, if you take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions that are listening and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little bit better.
Something Interesting About Joe
Joe Henning 3:11 Well, thank you, Brandon, I appreciate it. I look forward to the conversation today. And I’ve been most appreciative of your podcasts and the insights that they give with all the peers. As you said, I’m a native of Illinois, I born and raised there and about two years ago, moved down here to Georgia. And so right now, I’m having a little difficult time, loving my Chicago Cubs and what they did with the bloodletting this year, but especially living in Atlanta, Braves country after the World Series wins. So thank you for your time today. Appreciate it.
Brandon Burton 3:47 Absolutely. It’s a pleasure. Before we get into our discussion today, I’d like for you to sit to take a few moments just to share with us a little bit about the Henry County Chamber, kind of the size, scope, staff budget, just kind of give us some perspective before we get into our topic.
About the Henry County Chamber
Joe Henning 4:03 Sure. So excuse me, so I’m Henry County Chamber. It’s a little bit larger than I had. When I served in Aurora. We’ve got about 800 members. We do have the dual role as Chamber of Commerce and the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau for Henry County. There are four cities within Henry County we have about a I think we’re things that last census, we were pushing the 300,000 mark, maybe just a little bit over that. And what we’ve seen and this occurred prior to my coming here, but round 20 around 2000 or so. The population just exploded in Henry County. We’re just slightly south of Atlanta, about 30 minutes south of Atlanta, and the population exploded and that diversity that came with it is something that we’re still addressing, working with and supporting change management within that realm. So we’ve got, we’ve got kind of a southern hospitality, but we’ve also got that Atlanta metro feel to it. And so I think we’re all trying to figure out what that looks like for each one of us individually for businesses, for organizations, and that. So we’ve got about I’m sorry, we’ve got about seven employees full time employees on staff split between that tourism and the chamber. And I’m looking forward to the conversation today, kind of the lessons I’ve learned. And hopefully, as people follow the your podcast and hear this, maybe they’ll be able to share a couple lessons that they’ve learned too. And I always appreciate these programs, because I get something out of it as well.
Brandon Burton 5:39 Absolutely. Which our topic for discussion today is going to be around industry trends as we kind of look forward into the future some, and I appreciate you mentioning, you know, for listeners that hopefully they can provide some feedback as well. I recently started a Facebook group, chamber chat champions. So that is a place where we can kind of park some of these episodes. So after people listen to them, get on there and share some of your ideas. What are some of your thoughts going forward with industry trends? Let’s, you know, get some more discussion going around these episodes, make it a little bit more interactive, and said, well, we’ll jump into this discussion around industry trends as soon as I get back from this quick break.
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Alright, Joe, we are back. So as we look at the Chamber industry trends going forward, what are some of those things that are kind of top of mind for you that other chamber executives, other chamber professionals should be mindful of at least going forward?
Joe Henning 8:49 Well, I I’d like to, I’d like to take us back, it’s probably it’s probably been at least five years. And the ACCE, he put out their Horizon Report. And I believe at the time that they first launched it, there were eight influences. And then right after that, within about a year, they added the ninth one with limitations of government. And if nothing else, between the political and social fragmentation and the population shifts and the resources, and all of that, those nine areas that they identified. If nothing else in the last two years as a chamber leader, we’ve realized is that it was spot on. Like they knew what we were talking about, right? Everything that came to the global impact, the scarcity and abundance, all of these different pieces that they were looking at that were influencing the way we would be. And what they figured was 2025 hit us about five years early. And so, you know, as we look at that, I think one of the key takeaways is that people haven’t read that report and really looked at what those influences have, can do for their organization. They really need to check that And ASAP has a similar a similar identity that they’ve done for associations in general. And kind of, I’ve used them both in in teaching industry trends and chambers and associations in the future. But it really does help to go back and look at that. And what we’ve done in the past is group work, whether it’s a committee, you know, maybe it’s the ambassadors or as our Government Affairs Committee, is we’ve taken one of those nine influences and really dissected it down and said, Okay, if we’re looking at population shift, what does that mean? And for us, that’s become an abundance. Like I said, we’ve doubled our population within the last 30 years. And so we have an abundance of population. And with that shift, that changing demographic, what does that do for our community? And what do we need to do in order to embrace that support that that growth? So I think really looking at the influences over the last year, I think any any of us within the chamber world can can identify where those influences have impacted us with COVID pandemic. You know, its its impact on education. You know, we’ve got a one hand we’re sitting here in Henry County, I believe, at the end of October, we had a 2.6 unemployment, right. But that’s not taking into account those that have left the workforce. And so I still have businesses here that are struggling to hire, you know, they might, they might normally run three shifts, but they’ve only got enough employees that they can do two shifts. And so that impact on the local economy and the whole state’s economy is an issue that we have to address and figure out how we get that workforce back.
Brandon Burton 11:37 Yeah, there almost needs to be a different metric beyond Yes, sir. appointment, because it’s not showing what the true yeah, issue. Yeah, it’s,
Joe Henning 11:45 it’s truly a dated metric, when you think about it, when you think about how its measured, and why they chose that. It’s definitely a dated metric.
Brandon Burton 11:52 Absolutely. So as we are looking at the future of chambers, I mean, I think that’s spot on. If somebody is not familiar with the horizon, report, by ACC, to, to go download it, read through it, and be very familiar with it. And you’ll see a lot of things. It’s like, oh, yeah, this has happened.
Joe Henning 12:11 Oh, yeah. But there’s really,
Brandon Burton 12:16 but there still is useful information that is going to be very relevant to making sure your chamber is up on the trends and, and being insightful as to what the future has to offer. And if anything, I would say in the age of technology we’re in, it just speeds up the change. So you mentioned that these changes coming five years earlier, I think it has a lot to do with that. But
Joe Henning 12:38 it does, you know, one of those areas was that communicate the Communications and Technology. And I think if we weathered it successfully, we all realize that the only way we were going to be able to communicate with our members and our community was through technology, we weren’t going to be able to do we couldn’t do face to face for a number of months. And we couldn’t do the networking. And believe me, I am so glad that we were able to put that aside because you know, anybody that does a survey, networking is always at the top of the member wanted member need. And yet you get the same small group that shows up every month for the networking events. And so I think for all of us that were able to put that on the side burner, and really focus on being a resource for our businesses, whether they were members or not, you know, to be that resource to be relevant and essential to their success. I think that was the best opportunity, we all had to prove that we were more than just a networking organization, that that’s not what we were solely put here for that we had other things that we could provide to them. And that we were successful in doing that. And so when I look back at 2020, Brandon, as much of a struggle as it was for all of us, I still think it was a great opportunity for Chamber of Commerce to really prove its worth.
Brandon Burton 13:58 Absolutely, it really shined the spotlight on what chambers do. And the reason they’re there. And you know, I don’t know. I mean, networking obviously has a purpose. I mean, there’s a reason people ask for it. There’s a reason chambers do it. But it also becomes a it’s not a high demand task oriented thing for chamber to do. It’s relatively simple, provide a venue some drinks some reason to get together, right? Where it can be done on another level, you know, where it’s much more carefully curated and inviting certain people the network with a purpose and really having a reason instead of just coming and pitching what you have to sell to other people. You
Joe Henning 14:44 know, I think that’s exactly I think what I’ve tried to do over the last year or so is really speak to that activity as connections. And I know that also can can kind of be overused in that but but what I want them to realize Yes, we’re doing these, these opportunities for you to expand your network. But let’s make connections, you know, know who you’re looking to meet, let one of my teammates know who it is what it is you’re looking for. And when can we create those connections, whether it’s in person at an event, or via email, or phone call, or something like that. Because you know, you can have, you can take 50 business cards home from a networking event, you’re probably not going to connect with them, you’re not going to follow up with half of them. It looks good when you can stack them there. And you feel like you were successful, because you met 50 new people. But was that a better use of your time, or you you telling me that, hey, I need to, you know, I’m a realtor, I really need to know, the mortgage people that are in the membership I really need. That’s where my, that’s where my bread and butter is. So let me help make the connection with those 1012 1515 mortgage lenders, so you know, who you can reach out to, because, you know, you might need if you’re a realtor, you might need the plumbing expert at some point, if you’re trying to get a house up to market. But the rest of them, you know, you’re, it’s a waste of your time. And that’s, and that’s where I feel sometimes we we do what we’ve always done. And this this last couple of years was really an opportunity for us to evaluate what it was we were doing, and how do we move things forward. And I think that’s where so many chambers of commerce were able to prove their worth, and prove their relevance. And I think that’s what many of us have always struggled with, because everybody sees us, you know, stodgy, you know, politically connected, you know, really only looking out for the employer. You know, we were not I mean, we spent last year, we worked with one of the cities to give away $1.3 million to small businesses so that they could stay open, and they could keep their families under a roof. We worked with a lot of our health care providers to make sure that the COVID Panda COVID vaccine was out and people were getting it and that we could keep businesses open restaurants open. But keep the schools open, too, because we were seeing that struggle. So I mean, there’s still things that we’re dealing with, we’re dealing with early childhood care, you know, that’s something that we kind of saw 510 years ago was needed. But boy, did that pandemic open a lot of people’s eyes, yes, it really was a problem. And so now we’re kind of looking at that as how do we how can we help facilitate some change within that as well?
Brandon Burton 17:24 Absolutely. So what are some of these ways? I mean, we, we probably don’t need to get super deep into it. But the ways that chambers have shown the relevance, I mean, we’re beyond the networking, we’re beyond, you know, the the Staci, you know, the the well connected organization, but it really is about building a stronger community.
Joe Henning 17:46 Yeah, you know, you asked about Henry County, and I guess I didn’t think about it at the time. But, you know, we’re fortunate, we have a great and this started, this started literally, probably three months before the pandemic, it was like, right around January, maybe a little bit earlier than that, but but the school superintendent, the county manager, the executive director of our development authority, and myself sat down and started figuring out ways that we could work together. Then the pandemic hit within about three months. And fortunately, we had those relationships. So we knew who could take the lead on what and so we we went, and we started scheduling, virtual town halls, through zoom, Facebook Live. And because we had the trust in the relationship with those other three organizations, the four of us appeared together and talked about the pandemic and what that meant for education and what that meant for employers. You know, how the county was reacting to it. And so we were able to be that, that, that resource of knowledge for them and share that information, because we had already built that trust. And I think that’s where many chambers were able to succeed in the last couple of years was they started building that trust, they had that trust in place, or they were able to quickly get that trust together and look at how they could support the community as a whole. And I think what I saw from many of them was traditionally because when you look at it, what pays our bills is our members. So we do have to focus on those those members and what their needs are. But those that were really successful, still cared about the members, but they opened up their doors to all businesses, because they realized that we needed all businesses in order to keep our local economy strong. And so what many saw was a growth in their in their membership. Because once it once it turned around and those non members that you’d helped were coming in. But I think we also we also learned a lot about technology. You know, we were good at texting and emails and everything. But we went remote for about I think it was about three months that that we had closed Our office and we had one employee at a time in the office. And so we had to start communicating as a team via zoom. And so every day at 1030, I called a staff meeting unless you had the day off, you had to be on it. I wanted to see eyeball to eyeball the day that my team was doing, okay. But I also know that we still needed to bounce ideas around and get stuff done. And so that worked really well. So the technology, you know, we were looking at it, we were looking at how do we do webinars and things like that this forced our hand. And I think there were many chambers that really found that. And I think we’ve all found our success in that as well. We had talked a little bit I think, earlier in the podcasts, or maybe just before we started about timing, and kind of that evergreen aspect of it. And it was really interesting, when we would put one of our webinars out, we were really pleased with the numbers we had when we looked about two months later, they’ve more than doubled and sometimes tripled in viewers. And so that made us realize that it’s great that we’re doing these in person events where we can allow for the networking, and we can share the knowledge. But we’re missing so many people, you know, we’re missing are restaurant owners in that that have just closed and they’re not coming in for breakfast, because they’re in bad. You know, we realized that we need to figure out what that hybrid now looks like. And so that’s kind of what we’re looking at for 22 is how do we take that that technology that we’ve embraced, and bring it back to the in person opportunities for people to connect? And so I think that’s what 22 is going to be for us?
Brandon Burton 21:29 Yeah, I can see, you know, in the future, some chambers now, you know, as they start opening back up to more in person things again, but having a camera setup, and capturing, you know, everything going on, and then having a database of resources, and so on almost an on demand library, and repurposing it through social media and YouTube and podcasts and all these different ways. Because, you know, the way that the restaurant owner versus the insurance agent versus you know, the the retail shop owner, the way they digest the information is going to be so different. And you almost got to be there in every different way to be able to That’s right. That’s what we’re fighting. Yeah. Which, yeah, we all love to hear that. Right. Just creative work.
Joe Henning 22:13 You know, I think I think that’s the key, though, is we? We, you know, like I said, we do a lot of the networking, because that’s what’s expected. And I think if we can create opportunities for people to see, oh, you know what, I’d rather do this than just the networking. And we start really prioritizing what it is that we do and what that value add is. I think that’s how we can change what our business model looks like. And I think that’s what the future is for the chamber is, is it’s time for us to change. And this is going to help force our hand to do it.
Brandon Burton 22:42 Yeah, absolutely. So what are what are some of these other trends? Maybe that you see, I know. Yeah, diversity, equity. Inclusion is one that that I noticed. I don’t know if there’s others, you want to make sure that we highlight as we go about our discussion.
Joe Henning 23:02 You know, we talked a little bit about the political and social fragmentation. We, we realized a lot of that in Georgia, between Brunswick and Atlanta, you know, during the pandemic, and we, we had nothing as severe here in Henry County, but we did have some some conflict, for lack of a better word, I guess. And so you’ve got that fragmentation. And we took the technology, and we started doing community dialogues. And we had to do it virtually because you couldn’t be in person, but we were having success with our community dialogues, and really having the conversation around equity and diversity and inclusion. And from there, you know, it’s interesting, from there, we were able to, we’ve actually got a five part series that we put together for hospitality. And it’s called culture of customer service. And it’s looking at the needs and wants of our African American visitors, our Hispanic visitors, our Asian visitors, our LGBTQ visitors, and those with disabilities. And so we really looked at the diversity within the DEI, and put that out there for hospitality. And we’ve gained some great traction and interest with that, in fact, we’ve got non hospitality, businesses that are interested in providing that for their employees. So I think when we look at that fragmentation, we need to figure out as a community leader, you know, how do we address it, it might not be the same in every community across the country. But you know, we’re all kind of struggling. I think if we’ve got peers out there that have worked with it, I think that’s an opportunity for us to align with that. And then I think the last one, you know, because I know that we’re getting close to your 30 minute mark, but I think one of the lessons we look at is that resource alignment. And, you know, as I said, there’s a lot of things that we do because we’ve always done but that eats up resources. And like you said, we’re just you know, we’re Doing everything we need to really look at what we do well, and what we do, because it’s needed to be done. And so looking at those resources we have, and really applying them to what our mission as a chamber is. And there’s, you know, it’s said that if you’ve seen one chamber, you’ve seen one chamber. It’s not gonna that alignment is not going to be the same for everybody. But you got to go back and look at mission of your organization. And, you know, our priorities, our leadership development, business success, advocacy. So that’s where we put the largest amounts of our resources in. It might be financial, it might be human capital. But we really look at what those four areas of our mission are. And that’s where those resources go.
Brandon Burton 25:40 So this thought or question is kind of a combination on these last two points that you you hit on with the community dialogues you did, Randy and I, and then the the resource alignment. So I know, during 2020, we all got hit really hard with the the idea that we we all need to pay more attention to diversity, equity inclusion. It was a hot topic. And it was right for chambers to put a focus on that shine more light on it. At the same time, well, let me let me finish that. So So you shine more light, you guys are the community dialogues, which is awesome. I think if you didn’t strike when that iron was hot, and say you just now got around to doing the community dialogues, may not have the same impact that it did when you first rolled it out. So I think being able to quit, act quickly and pivot when you see that need. So I guess my question would be how would you approach the time when it’s right to make that quick pivot versus chasing the shiny objects and the squirrels is distress?
Joe Henning 26:47 Good understood, I think there’s still an opportunity, if there is a need that you’ve identified within your community, by all means have that conversation. Interestingly enough, our first dialogue was late June. And we started with Malcolm Gladwell, talking with strangers. And if anybody isn’t aware of that is his book about Sandra Bland death in Texas. At that she was from Chicago area, she was moving down there for a job and that and she, I believe it was she was in she was found in a cell. Excuse me. Um, strangely, I don’t know how, you know, I don’t know, sometimes you just lucked into success. And, excuse me, this was the five year anniversary of this occurrence. So we were able to use that. But we also took advantage of having great relationships with our police department and our faith based leaders. And so we had a, we had a conversation with a police officer, a faith based leader, and our chamber chair, and really looked at the different pieces that each of them brought to the conversation around the Sandra Bland death. Excuse me. And so, you know, we kind of looked at that as when we were programming, we wanted to make sure we had key individuals that took part in that conversation, because we were doing it virtually, um, it was a little more difficult to get a true community dialogue. But I think if you’re doing it now, you might have that opportunity that you can have the community dialogue. And so if I were to do it today, without the experience, I’d still look at starting with conversations around some of these books that are out there. And there are many, depending on what it is you want to address, we started with the race relations, because that’s where we were struggling in Georgia and in the southeast. But you’ve got others on other disabilities, LGBT, you know, you can look it up, there’s definitely, you know, an area each month that you can focus on, I would do it in an auditorium or a church and you can still have your panel up in front. But you also have then the opportunity that your community that’s, that’s joined you there that day can also ask questions, and so it does become more of that dialogue. So I think there are ways that we could still do this, if people haven’t done it yet. You know, they’re still waiting, there’s still a way that they can impact their community positively.
Brandon Burton 29:24 So in I mean, that’s that’s one example right around the DNI but it will say technology in there, you know, yeah, a new social media platform rolls out and you got to strike while the iron Todd or else he missed the boat and, you know, being able to weigh out, you know, does this really serve our members? Is it really served the mission of the chamber, or is this just the next shiny object and it’s gonna be gone? Yeah,
Joe Henning 29:50 no, I absolutely agree. Like I I, you know, if I could get out of social media, I would, but I think I think for any of us in the industry, you have to use that as a Pulse Point. And there’s a lot that you can find out about what’s going on within your community by looking at what’s what’s happening within that social media context. And whether it’s Facebook or Tik Tok, I mean, it’s Facebook or Twitter, I refuse tick tock, it’s just too annoying for me, I must just, I’m probably aging out. Um, but, you know, I try to limit when I get in there. So I don’t end up down too many rabbit holes. But you do start seeing where people are weighing in on things. And whether it’s, you know, the the limitations of your government, whether it’s locally or at the state level, or even at the federal level? If that’s a concern, then what can you do as an organization as a community leader, to help affect change there? You know, is it a conversation with one of your elected officials, we did that during our 40 day session last year, we couldn’t get to the Capitol because of the pandemic. And so, each Wednesday, I think it was about three o’clock in the afternoon, we took turns inviting each one of our elected officials, our State House State Senate, in for about a half hour conversation on what was happening that week, where they thought certain key legislation that we were interested in was was a dying wasn’t going further. And so it really helped us then to show that role that the Chamber plays in advocating for business. And so sometimes you just look into these successes. And, you know, I think you just have to be open to try and get it. Believe me, I, we laughed earlier when we started. But we’ve had some failures. I mean, we started some of these, these programs. And, you know, I pause it because we were a little bit early, and then I forget to turn the recording back on. And, you know, those things happen. And a lot of times, it’s happened to your guests, so they understand to that, oh, we’re gonna do that again. But you just have to go with it. It’s it is a little bit of a discomfort level that that learning curve you got, but I think it just makes us stronger. It makes our organization stronger. It gives us more tools that we can reach the business community in the community as a whole, so that we can do our service to what we’re here for.
Brandon Burton 32:12 Yeah, absolutely. Well, as we do start to wrap things up here, I wanted to see if you have any, maybe a tip or an action item that you would recommend to a chamber listening that they can do to help elevate their chamber up to the next level?
Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions
Joe Henning 32:26 That’s that’s a great question. I think. I think just to take it down to the basic, I challenged them all to do, you know, as a professional within the chamber industry, commit yourself to one goal of professional development in 2022. You know, it can be if you haven’t, if you haven’t looked into Institute for organization management with the US Chamber Foundation, look into it, it’s a four year program, but my goodness, the information you get out of it, the relationships that you creates, are amazing. And for me, that’s my sounding board, when I get stuck with something or I get frustrated or don’t even know where to turn is I go back to some of my peers from my classes or on some of those boards that I served on with them. And we kind of walk through what that is to learn. It could be you know, they’re listening to your podcast, that’s great. That’s professional development, they’re learning from, you know, these these outside of mind these great minds that are out there in the country leading a chamber of commerce, and it’s helping give them ideas. But I think, don’t be afraid to learn and make sure you’re committed to that go after your CCE or your ca IE, look at your state accreditation things. But the only way we have to treat this as a profession. And I think sometimes we’ve been lost with that. And we’ve seen some people that have come and gone that might not have thought it was a profession. But if we’re here for the long haul, and I think going on about 20 years now I consider that a long haul for me. Um, we have to look at it as a professional look at what that professional development looks like. And so I challenge people just kind of keep learning it. If nothing else we learned from the last two years is we have to stay on top of the trends, the knowledge that’s out there, what it is that we can do to better serve our members in our organizations, because we’re all in it together. And we’re here as parents, we’re here to help each other. And I can’t thank you enough for being one of those resources out there for the chamber for fashion and helping all of us to see where those resources and those ideas are.
Brandon Burton 34:37 Thank you. It’s my pleasure. I think it is such a important aspect to continue that professional development wherever you find it. You know, especially everything you listed, I think, you know, having a good mentor having a group of people you can go to and bounce some ideas off of. And these are things that have been shared in other episodes as well and it’s Stay, I’d love having that reinforcement. Oh, somebody, inevitably it’s happened or somebody that that’s where I need to reach out to so and so and, and they don’t do it because they’re busy, they get caught up. And then this is that reminder, go reach out to that person, that group that whatever it is to further your professional development, do it now make a note?
Joe Henning 35:21 That’s right. I think a lot of times we don’t do it, because we’re like, oh, it’s, it’s gonna interrupt what they’re doing. It’s gonna be an inconvenience to them. They’re gonna think I want something. And I’ll tell you what, when I’ve made those calls to thank people, or to see how they’re doing, or I’ve received those calls, it’s made both of our days, right, even somebody’s thinking about me, somebody cares. And I think that’s especially, you know, especially right now, and I hate to keep beating this pandemic. But that’s all we all want. We just want to know that there’s somebody out there.
Brandon Burton 35:51 That’s a fair point. Yeah. But so we’ve been talking all about industry trends. And I like asking this specific question to everyone I have on the show is, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Future of Chambers
Joe Henning 36:08 I think they’re, you know, there’s always going to be a need. I think the challenge we all have, as chamber professionals, is moving from a relevancy standpoint. And we all proved it, in the last two years that we were relevant, we were needed to being essential, and providing services that they can’t find somewhere else, or that we do so much better that nobody else can do it. And so I think that’s where we’re all heading. I couldn’t tell you, you know, I thought, I thought maybe we wouldn’t be a brick and mortar, because we did well enough. But you know, we also have the Visitors Bureau within our, our organization, so we’d still need to have something like that. But, you know, I think a lot of people are looking at what that space looks like, do they really need that large footprint? Or is it a smaller footprint that they can use and so I think we’re gonna see a lot of changes, I think we’ll see some some mergers, I think some of the smaller chambers might merge or might merge with another entity, whether it’s a Convention and Visitor’s Bureau or an Economic Development Authority. But we’re still going to be here, as long as we’re doing our job. And committing to it as a profession, I think we’re still going to see the need for chambers, they’ve been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. So as long as we keep picking up that challenge, and going forward, I think we’ll be here.
Brandon Burton 37:23 Absolutely. Move from relevant to essential. And I’ll put in a plug for Casey Steinbacher, with her essential, great, great read and really helps to look forward as to what chambers can do to become more essential. But, Joe, I’ve enjoyed this discussion today. And for having you here on the podcast with me, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information if if someone wanted to broaden their professional network or learn more about how you’re doing things, what would be the best way to reach out and connect with you.
Connect with Joe Henning
Joe Henning 37:56 Thank you, that’s great. I my contact information, I think the easiest is probably just go to Henrycounty.com. That’s the website, you’ll find my my ugly mug right there on the homepage, and click on that and get my email address (jhenning@henrycounty.com) and phone number (770. 957.5786). And if you are interested in seeing what we did with those community dialogues on that, search Henry Georgia Chamber on YouTube, and all of those dialogues, let’s video dialogues are up there. And they’re also on our Facebook page for Henry County, chamber, Georgia. And if you have questions on you know, if you want to know what we learned through that process as we improved it, by all means, reach out to me and my team and and I honestly, credit I’m looking forward to I am in that chamber champion chat that you have in Facebook. And so I’m looking forward to learning from others too, as they give us feedback on today’s podcast.
Brandon Burton 38:48 Awesome. I appreciate that. I will I’ll get your contact information in our show notes for this episode. It’ll be a chamberchatpodcast.com/episode159 and I’ll try to link the YouTube video or at least your YouTube channel in there. So people are gonna, you know, browse around and find those community dialogues that you reference when this has been fun. Thank you for joining me.
Joe Henning 39:13 This is all Thankyou. I’m glad we finally did get to connect. I apologize again for the delay but but it’s been a great conversation. Thank you.
Brandon Burton 39:20 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.
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As we are starting a new year, we are still in the midst of this worldwide COVID pandemic. I thought it would be helpful to share some tips in the written form to help you shortcut the work at your Chamber by sharing some lessons learned over the past 3 years of producing the Chamber Chat Podcast.
What Have We Learned?
Many Chambers are operating with fewer staff at the moment. Many have shifted what their working environment looks like by allowing for more work from home opportunities. Depending on where you are located, there may still be restrictions on the number of people who can gather at events. Each of these challenges present unique obstacles but I believe they also provide opportunities for growth.
Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, states that “Inside every problem lies an opportunity”.
Chambers have had to take a strong look at their value propositions and mission statements. As Chambers have done this, they have found ways to prove and show their relevance more than ever.
I have now been working in the Chamber world for over 15 years in the Chamber publishing space and 3 years with Chamber Chat Podcast. Over this time, I have learned a lot about what Chambers do, how they operate, the impact Chambers have in their communities, and I have also learned that many people in any given community don’t even know that their local Chamber exists or have any clue as to what a Chamber of Commerce does. I am working on a new project that will address this, so stay tuned for more details to come on this front soon.
2019 Lesson Highlights
At the end of each year while producing Chamber Chat Podcast, I have recorded a summary episode that highlights some of the key lessons that I learned that year that relates to the Chamber industry.
In 2019, some of the key lessons were:
A Chamber can and should be much more than a networking business community.
The importance of great community partnerships.
The need for talent & workforce development.
The importance of staying true to your strategic plan.
The future is bright for Chambers that stay relevant.
In 2020, as the pandemic hit and Chambers were stressed in new and complicated ways. As a result, several new lessons rose up to the top. In fact, I covered 20 lessons learned in 2020 for that year’s summary episode. Some of those key lessons were:
Trim the fat by burning sacred cows.
Chambers need to be agile to make quick pivots.
Set aside reserves in your budget.
We learned how to go virtual and how to use new digital tools.
Many Chambers saw podcasting as a way to stay connected with their members and community.
Probably the number 1 lesson from 2020 was the need to be flexible!
Lessons from 2021
As the “new normal” sets in, additional lessons need to be applied, which should help to sustain Chambers moving forward. Because of the timely relevance to these lessons, I will expand more than just a few highlighted bullet points. You can also access my lessons from 2021 at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode153.
Finance & Membership Models
Many membership organizations have had to really evaluate their overall structure. Everything from finances to membership models to strategic partnerships were on the table for discussion to keep their organizations in operation and to provide the needed service and value to their members. Some organizations saw the value in merging with another similarly aligned organization, possibly a tourism or economic development organization. Some Chambers even came together to create more of a county-wide or regional organization. There is value and strength in coming together. However, going back to one of the lessons from 2019, a Chamber must stay true to their strategic plan.
Some Chambers did not see the need to merge with another organization but they saw the need to create a triage for their business community whether or not a business was currently a dues paying member of their Chamber. As recovery from the pandemic started to pick up steam, some Chambers saw value in creating a free membership offering. I like the idea of how these Chambers are setting up these freemium models, but I would personally like to see the data from this model being implemented at other Chambers before applying it to my own.
In my opinion, Chambers are all about advancing their communities. This is accomplished through advocacy, networking, and connecting the right individuals for a stronger business environment. Doing these things will help to strengthen all areas of their community.
Online Communities
So, when more people are less involved in their communities, how does a Chamber go about doing this great work?
Well, one answer might be through creating strong online communities as a starting point. Online communities might serve as an on ramp to get others involved which can then transition into more in-person relationships. In today’s world, a Chamber would be doing a disservice to themselves if they are not utilizing the power and leverage of an online community.
Keep in mind that with many generations living and working in your community, they each prefer different methods of communication. Some really like in person events. Some will never attend an event but they will engage and support the Chamber in big ways through their screens.
Online communities can be set up on platforms such as Facebook. My word of caution is that you create a strategic plan for your online community BEFORE you launch it. This will help you in creating community guidelines and will guide you in the creation and frequency of content. This strategic plan should also create a road map for the member experience.
Preparing for the Future
Futureproofing is the next lesson that I will address. When COVID first reared its head, almost everyone caught off guard. Consumers made panic purchases of obscene amounts of toilet paper, business owners who were solely brick and mortar didn’t know if or when they would be allowed to open their doors again. Chambers adapted quickly to keep their business community apprised of government mandates and regulations, but at the same time were needing to cancel most of their non-dues revenue generators. Chambers were not prepared for this major disruption.
Moving forward, I would encourage Chambers to think and to prepare for worst case scenarios. How will you continue to serve your members if you had to shut down again? How will you bring in revenue if you are unable to gather and if businesses don’t know where their next dollar will come from? This idea of futureproofing can be wrapped in with the previous point of creating a strong plan for an online community. This can allow for you to pivot quickly and to deliver content and information to the people who need it the most.
Your Role as an Influencer
Casey Steinbacher’s e-book “From Relevant to Essential” laid out a great argument that shows why Chambers need to understand their role as influencers in their communities. I would encourage everyone to read this book for the full effect, but in a nutshell, we live in a world that is very different than it was 20 or 30 years ago. The newer generations engage in different ways and they tune into different voices. One of the main points of her book is to urge Chambers to embrace their role as influencers.
We don’t normally think of Chambers as influencers, but why are Chambers so great at conveening people and organizations for a greater cause…because they are influencers. Why do businesses join their local Chamber and ask for input on staffing, marketing, accounting, etc…because they are influencers.
Most Chambers turn to social media to flex their influence muscle. I find that many people turn to social media to tune out and they are not usually in the mindset to engage with Chamber content as it comes across their feed. Podcasts however, offer a much more intimate way to share information, and establish or reinforce your influence in the community.
Strategic Partnerships
This year as I did the Chamber of the Year Finalist interviews, each Chamber talked about their response to the COVID pandemic. Almost every Chamber shared how they created a strategic partnership with either their local Small Business Association, local banks, or other similar organizations to help distribute financial resources and relief to the businesses in their communities.
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These types of partnerships can open doors to new services and opportunities. These opportunities will help Chambers better serve their business community going forward.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
We have seen people and organizations of all types recognize the need for more focus and attention on diversity, equity and inclusion. Unfortunately it took the murder of George Floyd for the many of the racial injustices to rise to a higher level of importance. On the positive side, this extra focus on racial equity also allowed for a greater focus on other areas of diversity. It opened our minds to new ideas on how to be more inclusive to people who have traditionally been left out of our organizations for a variety of reasons. We also realized the need to provide more equitable opportunities for everyone in our communities. I believe we still have a long way to go with diversity, equity and inclusion, but we are going in the right direction.
Horseshoes vs. Chess
Anyone who listens to the Chamber Chat Podcast on a regular basis will know how much I love Dave Adkisson’s book “Horseshoes vs. Chess”. This book is what I describe as the best portrayal of what a Chamber of Commerce is and should be as well as what a Chamber Exec is and should be.
We are often asked what Chambers of Commerce do. Horseshoes vs. Chess helps to answer that question in a way that ordinary (non-Chamber) people can understand.
In the book, Dave shares an analogy about Chamber work compared to the games of horseshoes and chess. Some people look at Chamber work the same way they look at a game of horseshoes at a picnic. You don’t have to know much about the game, you can just toss your horseshoes towards your stake and if you get close you get a point.
Dave shares how Chamber work is really much more like a game of chess. You have different pieces that can do different things and you need to understand the role of each piece. One piece may be education. Another piece might be workforce development, and another tourism, and another economic development, etc. The idea is that you must know what each piece is capable of doing while also understanding that you can’t move all of the pieces at the same time. I think this analogy is perfect and it should resonate with most Chamber professionals.
Make Pivots
The final lesson that I will share from 2021 is that I need to make some pivots. I am coming up on the third anniversary of Chamber Chat Podcast. While I still plan to continue with the podcast, I do have some other new and exciting opportunities and projects that I am working on that I hope to reveal very soon. Hopefully you and your Chamber have noticed areas where you can grow and improve as well. In the end, it is about providing the best value and the highest level of service possible.
I wish you all a very successful 2022. I am sure it will be full of new lessons that will help us move closer to our potential. Keep up the great work!
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Doug Holman from Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions presents Next Level Coaching. Next Level Coaching is group coaching, one on one mentoring, and a peer support community.
Holman Brothers is offering a FREE 30 day trial of Next Level Coaching for all Chamber Chat Podcast listeners. All you have to do is visit holmanbros.com/nextlevel. There is no obligation and no credit card required. This allows you to experience a full month of Next Level Coaching which includes two group coaching sessions and access to their support hotline to help you when needs arise.
Holman Brothers has been a great supporter of this podcast and I know Doug and Bill have valuable resources to share with you and your membership staff.
Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Pat Patrick. 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 wants to support your health by encouraging you to go for a 30 minute walk outdoors. He’s my dad Brandon Burton.
Brandon Burton 0:23 Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.
Our title sponsor for this episode is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Is your chamber struggling to drive the revenue it needs to support your initiatives? It’s a common problem and one that our new title Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions knows a lot about Doug and Bill Holman aren’t just sales consultants. They’re real life chamber guys with 20 plus years of chamber leadership experience. They know how to diagnose and solve member recruiting issues faster and better than anyone else. And they’re ready to put that knowledge to work for you and your chamber. Call the Harmon Brothers today at 61985 to 1391. Or check them out at HolmanBros.com. That’s holmanbros.com.
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Guest Introduction
Our guest for this episode is Pat Patrick. Pat worked in executive marketing roles and advertising capacities for Safeway stores, Tyson Foods and Foster Farms poultry company and I see marketing systems overseeing multi million dollar budgets and multiple advertising agencies over his career. Pat came to the Lodi Chamber in California in 2001, where he was appointed the chambers president and CEO. Pat has been part of the success of Lodi wine country through establishing international access to Central America and China for Lodi wine exports and major strategy was leading the sponsor leading and sponsoring trips abroad for Lodi ventures and for foreign buyers to visit Lodi. He was also the author and developer of vision 2020 a catalytic economic look forward the Lodi community which has positioned Lodi for early success in the new decade. Pat has and is today active in volunteer roles, such as several local not for profit boards, including the Adventist Health Lodi Memorial Hospital, reaching outside of both Lodi both regionally and nationally in the chamber industry. Pat has served as past president of the Northern California Chamber association was asked to join two national fellowships one developing healthy communities and the other focusing on workforce development, and 2017. He was elected by his peers to be the board chair of WAC. In 2020, he was selected to receive the excellence and leadership award the organization’s highest honor. Pat is a graduate from the University of Texas and the Institute of organizational management. At Pat, I am happy to have you with me today here on chamber chat podcast. I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions who are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can get to know you a little bit better.
Something Interesting About Pat
Pat Patrick 3:28 Well, thank you, Brandon. It is my honor to be on here. I think you’ve done a couple of 100 of these and so but I’m just honored to be included. I’m excited to share with my fellow chamber professionals, some of the success that has come to the Lodi chamber of commerce with a great program. And something interesting about me. Well, my best friend’s dog, his name is Tucker. I don’t know. I think I sent you a picture of Tucker. Yeah. So if the people can see Tucker then they’ll know Hey, I’m an okay guy. Because that dog is great looking dog and he’s my best friend back. He’s here. He comes to the office. He’s He’s our greeter
Pat’s dog & best friend-Tucker
Brandon Burton 4:20 the chamber mascot there. Hey, man. That’s awesome. Oh, yeah, I’ll have to put a picture of Tucker in our show notes so people can log on and see that and we’re getting close to a couple 100 episodes. This is actually 158 But we’re getting up there. We’re racking them up. So met with a lot of great chamber people. So it glad to add you to the mix. Yeah. So before we get into our discussion today, I’d love for you to take a moment to tell us a little bit more about the Lodi chamber kind of the the the size the scope of your chambers. staph budget, that sort of thing to kind of set the table for our discussion.
About the Lodi Chamber
Pat Patrick 5:04 Sure. We are in 2022. Next year we will be 99 years old. Formed in 1923. And at that time probably our membership was made up of a lot of farmers because we are surrounded by something called the Hanford sandy loam. That’s not my description, but that’s the name of the dirt around us, which is very, very rich and has a long history of growing great things. Today there’s 100,000 acres of wine grapes that surround Lodi but I as a wine region, and with the home of Robert Mondavi, right, he was he grew up here is quarterback on the high school football team. And he worked in his family’s vineyards. And he when he’s he went to France to you know, learn his winemaking craft and then came back and put in a very large production facility in Woodbridge, which is a suburb of Lodi. Lodi is a town of 68,000 people. Okay, so we’re not, we’re not big at all. The chamber has 700 members, and we had a staff of seven prior to the pandemic. And since then, we’ve been operating on three and a half staff and we’re busy people. And so we have we are coming back with that, you know, pretty good bank balance in the bank right now. Because we cut a lot and so our membership stayed with us. We couldn’t do any of our events. We have a couple of large revenue producing events first those were gone. But we are coming back strong. It is good to hear Yeah, we got a good ambitious 2020 to play.
Brandon Burton 7:14 Good deal. So and I know we’ll we’ll get into that with our topic for the we’ve settled on for this episode is which is creating a vision. And specifically you guys have what’s called vision 2020 And we’ll have you share some of the details of that as soon as I get back from this quick break.
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All right, Pat we are back. As I mentioned before the break we were talking about creating vision and specifically around your Vision 2020 that you helped to author for the Lodi chamber there in a nutshell what is Vision 2020.
Pat Patrick 10:02 In a nutshell, vision 2020 is an act was an economic look forward. It started in 2014 an economic look forward for our community. We identified five major areas of great challenge for Lodi, but they also offered great promise for lota. And so as I told people, we get to decide which one that’s going to. You’re going to be for Lodi and those were Workforce Development how to you know, get the young people of today ready for the jobs that they’ll need tomorrow. And then our own communities economic competitiveness. Lodi was never has never been marketed as a place to come and do business. And we are 90 miles east of Silicon Valley, which was probably another at that time, the number one place for job creation in the United States, right. And then we had business and community health. We wanted to make sure businesses healthy and their number one asset is their people. And so we joined arms with the hospital and and some other health care professionals to create a whole plan to get Lodi healthier. And then we looked at the livability of Lodi because today we have 90 wineries. And this close to some major population centers we develop the tourism industry. But tourism was the other was the last area that we looked at. And we just need to bring more people to Lodi and the livability aspect which I skipped over was one of those people that we need in our community to grow our community. What do they think the livability is like Ilona, and so we’re concerned at that from a tourist standpoint, from a job creator standpoint, and then for young families to work in those new jobs.
Brandon Burton 12:24 I think those five points the workforce development, economic competitiveness, business and community health, livability and tourism are things that probably most chamber champions listening can kind of look internally at their organization and say, how do we measure up in these different categories? Where do we need to bulk up? Where do we need to shift some some focus to make their communities stronger in these different areas. So as we talk, I’m sure you’ll highlight some of the things like you have with the wineries and stuff that are very specific to Lodi, but for those listening, you all have, you know specific things for your communities as well that make you attractive and make people or that can make people want to live and work and visit and do all sorts of things in your community. So I’d encourage everyone to pay attention to those things in your own community as we go about our discussion today. But how, how is the division created? Kind of how you know who was involved with the with the creation of it?
Pat Patrick 13:34 Um, well, it’ll be fires often start from little sparks, right. And so I am a member of WAC, which was outlined in the introduction. And the president of that organization is a fellow by the name of Dave Kilby. And so Dave does a good job, and helping executives grow. Chamber executives grow. He’s a reader. I’m a reader. He has suggested some really great books to me over the years, right. And a couple of those really changed my life in terms of how I viewed my job, and here at the chamber, and what I’m really responsible for in this seat as president and CEO of the community Chamber of Commerce. And so it got to be when I looked in the mirror in the morning, here, it was, it was a challenge. I started to challenge and so the book that really got me was a book called The Coming Jobs War. Again, it was written in like 2012, but I think it’s very still very good and applicable for today. But it changed my life. It’s written by Jim Clifton. Jim Clifton is the CEO of the he’s the CEO of the Gallup Corporation, I’m sorry. Okay, who who does a lot of polling, obviously, not just political polling, but he polls on everything in the human endeavor that we go through. And he does. So in about 150 different countries, they have offices in 75 around the world. So he knows what’s on top of mine on people’s heads. And it says, In the number one thing was jobs, what happens if I lose my job in this world right now? What happens if I can’t get a job that I want, or, you know, 25% of the world’s population is without a job. And that’s still true today. So it’s a it’s problematic. So. And he talked a lot about the influences on a community. And it just changed me, I, I saw some challenges that we had in Lodi, and no one really addressing the community, you know, your city does a general plan, which identifies where to put the housing, where to put the industry where to put the commercial, but they don’t really plan that much on the economic growth, the security of that, because without that, you don’t have a good community at all. And so we, we, you know, I took that on, because we had health challenges, too, in the county where we live in California, one out of every two people are either pre diabetic or diabetic. That’s a lot of money that, you know, that the workforce has to put in to, you know, towards that element alone. So we got a good response from our larger employers, we came out with programs to help their people get healthier. That’s what one of those five areas was about in the workforce development, the retiring baby boomers, the younger people coming in, are they prepared to work with the millennial generation, there are some challenges. And so we see that and we wanted to have some frank conversations with our school district to make sure that we were preparing kids for the workplace, not only on hard knowledge, skills, but soft skills as well. And so I just sort of lit myself on fire.
And started talking to I went around groups and pushing this concept 2020, I had a population pyramid, which is one tool that I would recommend to any chamber commerce professional. It’s a bar graph that shows the population and how it is arrayed in your community, population pyramid, and ours, what I mean, there’s 1000 things that that one graph can tell you. And it makes you aware of the changes that are coming over the next 10 years in your community population wise. Right now, we see a lot of shifts coming in. So how does that impact your community? How do you change your community to or prepare your community whether you know for what’s coming? And so we I would go out and talk to service clubs, I got on the stage at the community theater with about 900 people, and I just wanted people to get close to me. So the what was burning inside me would catch them on fire too. Because what vision 2020 needed was about 70 volunteers, leaders and influencers to pick up this mantle and start charging and that’s what we did. We put about 15 people in each one of those five areas. We call them that vision action team. Okay, kind of goes with Lodi right wine. So it wasn’t the chamber. I always envisioned the chamber being on top of a mountain kind of kicking over some big rocks and hoping that a landslide would start when when the chamber rocks would hit the healthcare rock and in the education rock and it would start to roll down. And so it it quickly became bigger than the chamber but the chamber had the responsibility to drive it. And that meant the board I tried to put as many leaders and influencers on my board as possible. We only had a board of 12. Today we have a board of 15. But in those days, we had a board of 12. And the best business people in Lodi is what the goal is. I could talk about how we do that to the nominating committee, which is valuable for chamber execs. But what we did was we, we built the board drove it in five areas. So we put two board members on each one. And so they were in charge of running their that their vision action team. And if it was tourism, we had the leaders and tourism in our community on that committee. If it was workforce development, we had the career tech people from the high school we had the community college, we had employers, from industry and from business, all kinds of business sectors. And health, we had a bunch of health professionals, they’re trying to work on this big problem about the diabetes, and the health of our community, the health of our business community. Very important. So you kind of get the idea. We had 70 people from the community, top people, the superintendent of schools, a CEO of the hospital, and they brought some of their folks. We had this we had city government, their city council people even had county supervisors want to sit in because they heard about this. I had one county supervisor say, Well, can you come do this for the county?
No, I can’t. There’s only one of me. But we wrote a 43 page booklet with color photographs and graphs and things to back up everything that we were trying to the condition that our community was in where we wanted to go and how we thought we were going to get there. So each of these five vats, the people, they started with a vision statement, they created a vision statement for tourism, created a vision statement for workforce development and so on. What will this look like? What will tourism look like in Madang? In 2020? That was the question, what will it look like? Right, and so they wrote a vision statement of what that would be. And then the next thing they had to come up with once they had the vision statement was what are the strategies that we have to employ to make that vision come to pass? And then once you get the strategies, strategy, number one, number two, number three, what are the action steps over the next five years because this was 2014, to get us to 2020 to achieve our vision. So vision flowed into the strategies. And the strategies were made up of action steps that were on a timetable. lead organizations lead people were identified to make sure that that thing kept moving forward, that actions do
Brandon Burton 23:29 I love that. I love the idea of these bats to be able to have these or these committees to over these specific segments have the vision to three that vision, the strategies, the action plan and see these things through to you know, like you said over a five year thing, so I assume the people that are involved with these vats, it was a was it a five year commitment to be on one of these committees. Is that how I was approached Okay. Very good.
Pat Patrick 23:57 As some people you know, drop out some new ones. Come on. So, yeah, so a lot of great things happen. We have a huge today we have a huge biking community bicycle. It was enough we want to have one stage I guess you could say we had two people in our livability that and they formed bike Lodi and now bike Lodi has done fantastic things. I mean, we have bike trails that go from downtown now all the way out in all directions. We didn’t have that before. We didn’t have tourism wayfinding signs before we got those put up. These are examples of the action steps to get things done right. And so great things just sort of organically came out. And it worked. It worked.
Brandon Burton 25:05 So now here we are, as we record this, or at the end of 2021. This will be releasing beginning of 2022. But you guys have been able to see this vision unfold. How do you vision out? You know, the next five years? Let’s say, I have is that looking for Lodi? And are you continuing the same type of structure, same type of model or what? What’s your thoughts and plans going forward?
Pat Patrick 25:33 Okay, good question. We, there were a total of 55 action steps that were created for those five. That’s right. And we achieved 38 of them, which is quite a few. And some of the ideas were just a bridge too far. And some of them weren’t, didn’t turn out to be a good idea at all. And so what we did was we wanted to keep an effort going, but the main effort, what changed in our world was businesses started coming over the hill, there’s been an exodus from the Bay Area, Sacramento has really prospered from that. And again, load I really hadn’t been marketed. And so we we created a completely new website. Not a chamber website, but what I call an attraction website. Yeah. And it’s called grow in Lodi, very simple, you can go to it grow in lodi.com. And you’ll see a lot of information about Lodi from what, what the living is about here, what the climate is about, what, what’s to do here. testimonies from business owners who were doing business in the San Francisco Bay Area, and they came over to Lodi and started or renewed their business and what has been their experience and so it’s it’s been catching on slowly but good. We have one of the fastest growing businesses the fastest. Certainly the fastest growing business in Lodi, and one from Sunnyvale is a business called Cepheus. Their molecular diagnostic company that bought out a supplier here that supplied them with a key product. And long story short, they bought that company 38 employees today they’re at 750. Next year, there’ll be a 2500. Wow, molecular diagnostic and healthcare right now is head of premium. They went from one small building to now four very large buildings and made the made the step to bring their research and development over here. So that’s huge for a small town. And so they’re growing in Lodi, and we’re using them as sort of a bell cow to bring other people over, because they’ve had some great success here. And they’re big proponents, they love it here. And so there’s room for more. And so that grow in Lodi, today’s Board is saying okay, what’s next? We really liked what vision 2020 did. How about a vision 2030 And I couldn’t agree more. Yeah. I agree more. And so we’re, we’re in the very early planning stages of that. I’ve got an excited board. And that is so key to any success that a chamber executive at a chamber could have is to get the right people on the bus and sitting in the right seat. That’s right. Yeah.
Brandon Burton 29:01 And I think a big part of that is these bats he talked about that’s putting the right people in the right seats that are excited and know about what the opportunities are in these different segments that are specific and relevant to Lodi you know, in our conversation but you get get those people in the right seats, they are able to create that vision, bring it back together create the synergy it’s just it’s a great model that you guys have gone through and and you’ve done well explaining it to because I can see all the different intricacies you know that have gone into this.
Pat Patrick 29:36 Right. Yeah, and some of the serendipities are the real the relationships that form you know, because here’s the school district in their silo so to speak, you know, fighting the battles that they fight working every day hard, everybody’s busy. And then here’s city government over here and they’re doing their thing and then here’s, you know, health care over here. They’re doing their thing. And here’s the Chamber of Commerce trying to help everybody out in all directions. And so, hey, what if we all got into the same silo? Right? Instead of all working, so, you know, making time to align ourselves with each other over the big community, the things that are really driving to unity, and, and their little rolling, or their big rolling and working together. And that is, that has been great. And I think that’s really one of the things that is, in the My current board about wanting to, hey, let’s do that vision. 2030. Right, because we know we’re not where we want to be yet. Yeah.
Brandon Burton 30:49 So as we start wrapping things up here, I wanted to ask you, for the listeners, what would be maybe a tip or an action item that you would encourage them to do to help, you know, elevate their chamber up to the next level?
Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions
Pat Patrick 31:03 Yeah. Well, I mentioned reading, it’s a funny thing, you know, you’re gonna watch a video or you can listen to something of book on tape or something. Yeah. And they’re great. But, you know, set a goal, if you’re a leader, set a goal to read a book a month. And usually books around 200 pages long. And so that’s like 10 pages a night, put up a nightstand, and then go to sleep 10 pages, you know, but pick the book, and ask some of the ask some of the CEOs that you look up to for some both times that can help that can help a person out in their leadership role, their community role there, you know, the, the Chamber of Commerce, there’s some great ones out there. One of them’s called Make it Happen. That was one of the first ones that I got. And what happens When the Boomers Bail was very intellectually about the changing indite. In the demographics as the seniors, the baby boomers move out of the work force, and the millennials coming in the changes, you know, dramatic. So it changes you, it makes you smarter, and it also touches something inside you. Chamber executives have, I think, the best job in the community, they really do. Yeah, because you’re working for some great people, working for all the different businesses in your community that create the jobs and those employees, buy homes, make loans through the bank, create property tax, create sales tax, and it makes the community go around. I really believe really truly and believe that you don’t see a good community without a very robust active business community. Face it, we make the we make the community work. If you can get it better for business, you’ll get it better for the community
Brandon Burton 33:31 very too. And I appreciate you sharing those, those book references too. So we’ll have those in the show notes that people can look up and if they wanted to check out one of those books make it happen or what happens in the boomers Dale and you mentioned earlier the Coming Jobs War as well. So good options.
Pat Patrick 33:50 Those are just three. Yeah, if anybody wants to get in contact with me or you can go to the to the chamber website, Lodi chamber comm click on grow in Lodi, and you’ll see just a little introduction to vision 2020. Not the whole thing. But I could supply them with other information. Somebody wants to go further. I knew, I know, chambers do a lot of community type plans. But I never came across one that was an economic look forward. Because that really gets to the heart of so many issues. It does.
Brandon Burton 34:29 Right And speaking of looking forward as we look forward to the future of chambers of commerce in general. And how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Future of Chambers
Pat Patrick 34:40 We only become more and more important in the information age if we still refer to ourselves as being in the information age. There’s so much out there. And we know that a lot of it can’t be trusted, or it’s always going to have a leftward spin or around With spin, where is where’s truth? Versus truth? A chamber is not Republican, it’s not Democrat. It’s not red, it’s not blue. It’s, it’s it’s the community. It’s about the future. That’s where That’s where a chamber is roll is. And it, it creates opportunity did, I think a podcast from chambers, um, we we started down that path. But then the board sort of took us in a new way. And so I’ve got all the equipment that I’m working because I think, to be the same middle, right, the same middle, on on community issues, you’re gonna tackle probably anything that’s happening in Washington, DC, or, in my case, even Sacramento, as low as a small community, but in that community, you know, if your newspapers are going out, or they’re getting thinner, now’s a good time to start, I think, bringing two people together, like point counterpoint. Yeah. And and do it very respectful of each other. And do it with information, not necessarily what your opinion is, but what you know, to be the facts on this issue, and the other person who may be and have an intellectual conversation. And I think that can be very, very valuable. And it they, I don’t know where it would go. But I think it would go in ways start on the business platform approach. But I think it could go very deeper into things like homelessness as I can. Yeah, every community’s got that challenge. And, hey, there’s the smartest people I know, are business owners, right? Very successful business owners. What do they think? How can they think out of the box, and help the community get a program?
Brandon Burton 37:11 I love that if if the purpose of a chamber is to help build stronger communities, you need to be that go to resource of trusted information, that’s that sane center to be able to bring both sides together and really get behind issues to drive progress forward. So I think you hit the nail on the head
Pat Patrick 37:29 is that we call ourselves a three C chamber. I don’t know if you’ve heard that before. Yeah, yeah. A catalyst for business growth, a convener of leaders and influencers, for positive change, but always to be seen as a champion for the community, three C’s catalyst, convener, and champion.
Brandon Burton 37:50 That’s, that’s why I call my audience chamber champions, you know, they that’s one of the essays to draw him in.
Pat Patrick 38:00 And that’s what they need to try to ascribe themselves to the film. Yes.
Brandon Burton 38:05 Well, Pat, before we go, I wanted to give you an opportunity to put any contact information out there for listeners who may want to connect with you and learn more about your vision 2020 and going about creating a vision of their own their chamber, what would be the best way to reach out and connect with you?
Connect with Pat Patrick
Pat Patrick 38:24 Well, I can be reached at PPatrick@LodiChamber.com. And the old fashioned way on a telephone for my direct line is 209-365-4604.
Brandon Burton 38:45 Which is perfect. And I will get that in our show notes for this episode as well. So we’ve got a lot of good stuff in there. We got some book recommendations, we’ve got pets contact info, a pitcher Tucker, hopefully we’ll get in there as well. So go to chamberchatpodcast.com/episode158. And, Pat, it’s been a pleasure having you on here. I really appreciate you carving out some time to visit with me and to talk about this important work that chambers across our country are doing and you guys are doing a great job there in Lodi.
Pat Patrick 39:18 Thank you. Thank you, sir. Enjoy.
Brandon Burton 30:28 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.
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