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

Episode 55 — How to Use Data at Your Chamber with Britt Delo
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Britt Delo
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.83 Brandon Burton
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.
00:14.89 Britt Delo
And now, your host, his favorite football team is the San Francisco Forty Niners. He's my dad, Brandon Burton.
00:23.106 Brandon Burton
Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. This is episode 55, and glad that you guys are all here with us today. Today, our guest on the show is Britt Delo, who is the director of membership at the Michigan West Coast Chamber of Commerce, of course, in Michigan. And one of the West Coast Chamber's core values is it's all about you. As the director of membership, Britt DLo utilizes this core value to the fullest extent. This involves recruiting and onboarding new members, engaging with existing members, and developing partnerships to grow sponsorship revenue. Britt was an ambassador for several years prior to joining the team. Britt's background is in business development, customer service, and retail management. She was the captain of the Hope College women's swim team and was also recognized as scholar athlete and academic. All American all four years. She brings that same energetic and competitive spirit to the West Coast chamber. Today on the show, as as I have Britt with us, we're going to be talking specifically about how to use data at your chamber. I know that's one of those topics that everybody at the in various chambers knows that we should be using data, but are not quite sure how, or necessarily all the ins and outs of why and and how to implement that. So that'll be our focus of discussion today, which we'll jump into as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors. Every chamber is looking for new ways to increase their non-dues revenue. Has your chamber found a good affinity program? I have a great affinity program to offer your chamber that will continue to increase in revenue year after year. I want to introduce you to Swipe It for all of your credit card processing needs. Swipe It has a unique affinity program that 1.2
02:26.274 Brandon Burton
Helps your chamber members be more profitable, and three, provides recurring nondues revenue to your chamber. To learn more, please visit chamberchappodcast.com slash CC for credit card. Again, Chamberchappodcast dot com slash C C and get swiping with swipe it. All right, Britt, we are back and I wanted to thank you for joining us today. And if you would please just take a moment to say hello to the audience and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you better.
03:04.172 Britt Delo
Yeah. Hi. thanks so much for having me, Brandon. I'm really excited to be on the show today and excited to chat with all of you and share a little bit about what we have going on here in Michigan. so kind of a a fun fact about myself. so you're getting my voice today, but many years ago, so back when I was in elementary school, I was actually the co-host of a little local TV show that was through our local hospital, Holland Hospital, called the Be Well Show. and we gave healthy tips and we did aerobics and it was just my fun little five minutes of fame years back.
03:41.262 Brandon Burton
That's awesome. So that means you must have a face for TV where I've got a voice for radio.
03:49.758 Britt Delo
I don't know about that.
03:52.306 Brandon Burton
That that's neat though. Neat little background. So if you would
03:56.472 Britt Delo
Don't find any of those on Google if you look for it.
04:01.976 Brandon Burton
Be before the times of YouTube, right? Yes. Yes. well take it tell us a little bit about the the Michigan West Coast Chamber, the size, location, budget, just so we can all relate to a little bit more to this perspective that you're bringing as we get into the topic today.
04:05.122 Britt Delo
Totally. Yeah, thank God.
04:21.848 Britt Delo
Yeah, absolutely. so we're in Michigan over on the west side of the state, right along the lake shore, which is fantastic.
04:29.228 Brandon Burton
Name your name is very descriptive of the location too. So it's
04:32.686 Britt Delo
Exactly. And it kind of adds that California vibe, which is fun. and part of the reason that it's the West Coast Chamber is because about seven years ago the Holland and Zealand chambers merged together. so there were two separate chambers, and so when that happened, we rebranded and renamed ourselves the West Coast Chamber because we now cover two communities. So that's the the reason for the name there. we have about 1200, a little over 1200 members. there are eight of us on staff. And our community, we've got about thirty-three thousand in Holland and about six thousand in the Zealand area. So we're close to about that 40,000 range per population.
05:18.432 Brandon Burton
Okay. Very good. and I think that's kind of in the sweet spot of a lot of the chambers that are listening is kind of right about the same size of a a chamber you are. Some a little larger, some a little smaller, but I think what you have to say and share with them today will be very applicable. So as I've mentioned in in the introduction, that our topic for discussion today is going to be about how to use data at your chamber. So I know Chambers are full of programs and initiatives and things that that they do to promote business and general goodness throughout the community. And for a long time it was the chambers sitting down thinking, what does the community need? How can we better serve our members? Some chambers still do that today. They are doing it based on what they think. So how do you get over what the chamber thinks their membership needs and the community could benefit from? to what they really need.
06:19.974 Britt Delo
Yeah, well, at our chamber here, it's through a lot of data. and at first it can feel a little overwhelming and even a little bit scary, like where do I even begin with this? But we really just we started looking, I mean, kind of department and each department started tracking things and tracking results so that we could start making better decisions with that data. so if we take a look at membership, for example, it all sort of started with really defining it sounds simple, but defining a target market and really looking closely at that. So we started looking at what our ideal chamber member looks like. You know, take a sample of your very best chamber members and and what that looks like, a snapshot. And so we started looking at this in terms of A, B, and C members and prospects. and this isn't to be mean, it's not that you've got C members that are terrible. It's just really looking at, you know, defining the targets. with a few things in mind. So for us, an A member has a physical presence in our area. They have potential for employment growth. They've been in business for two or more years. they have sponsorship potential. And then they also have dues above the minimum level. so they're a little bit higher on that dues level scale. And this doesn't mean that we won't work with organizations that don't fit that mold, but those are the ones that we're going to be targeting as our A member process.
07:52.768 Brandon Burton
Okay, that makes sense. so then how do you as far as when you're identifying these A, B, and C, I I I want you to go through the Bs and C's also, but yeah, you're making those identifying qualities, I guess, so you can see how to to gather the data from those categories. Is that is that where you're going with it?
08:15.896 Britt Delo
Yeah, exactly. So you know, we start tracking this information right in our system so that as I'm looking at pipeline development and kind of where members are along in that process, I can really spend a lot more of my time focusing on follow ups with A and even B members and prospects versus spending a lot of time trying to track down those the C's because in the end we find that the Bs and Cs tend to be those members that end up churning. quite a bit. and again, not to say that we're happy that we'll give them the same exact experience and work with them just the same if they do join the chamber. But as far as prospecting goes, spending more time on those A members that will most likely be here for the long term. So what it really kind of boils down to is it's it's allocating my time in a way that's going to have the the greatest benefit. It's more efficient and it has a longer, longer term benefit and give this revenue streams that are much more efficient and you know really that we can count on.
09:22.262 Brandon Burton
And it's looking more at the kind of the eighty twenty rule, trying to get eighty percent of your results from twenty percent of your efforts. So
09:29.452 Britt Delo
Yes. Exactly. Yep. Stream and and when it's in the system too and everybody in our organization knows about that, they know how to i interact and relate with those prospective members as well. You know, maybe there's a free event you add in because you've got an A prospect that you're trying to work on and and so other people are aware then of that and it just streamlines the whole process internally as well.
09:51.938 Brandon Burton
Yeah. So you'd mentioned the the A type of members or prospects is those that have a physical presence, been in business for over two years and kind of that higher level dues or maybe revenue that possibilities. what are the the B and C levels that that you look at?
10:12.834 Britt Delo
Yeah, so the B's are categorized as maybe they have a sales rep based in our area in our target location. and maybe they've been in business for less than two years, so they're still kind of stabilizing as an organization. And then C's are categorized as those who are located outside of the target market and they have unlikely employment growth. and so this might look different for different organizations. These don't have to be you know, hard and fast rules for everybody, but it's kind of taking a look at what what characterizes a really, really great member in your community so that you can categorize them and and spend your time wisely.
10:56.622 Brandon Burton
So you'd mentioned all this is being logged in your system. So for current members, you can that makes it easy to prioritize who's the A member A level, B and C level members. And as you look at prospects, how are you able to look at look to data to categorize them into one of those categories?
11:19.18 Britt Delo
Yeah, so some of it is kind of simple and upfront where it's a location. And so you can categorize them and sometimes it's looking at it and and taking your your best guess based on what you know about an organization. And until you have the chance to go in and meet with somebody, sometimes you don't have all of the details, but you can get a a pretty good feel for where a prospect will lie within that range based on, you know, info you can find online or conversations you've had with other people if it's a potential referral. So you give it your best guess. I mean, work with what you've got and then update and refine it as you go.
11:56.342 Brandon Burton
Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So that's prioritizing your prospects is going to get you the best bang for your buck as far as the time that you invest in to developing these members and giving them the best experience at your chamber to be able to identify what your target market is, kind of fit them in those those buckets, those A, B, or C buckets. And then from that you're able to prioritize how you allocate your time and resources to developing that member experience. Am I gathering that right?
12:30.924 Britt Delo
Yep, exactly.
12:32.19 Brandon Burton
All right. Very good. So let's let's talk a little bit about maybe the lead sources. Where where do you turn to to collect data? And I know that's maybe a loaded question because there's a lot of options out there, but what are what are some of your best lead sources that you can share with us?
12:52.854 Britt Delo
Yeah, so we started tracking this a little over a year ago and we track it in a number of well, we track it right in our system so that we can create reports, customized reports where we can view this information in a couple of different areas. So one place we're tracking this is on a pipeline that I've developed. So we work in Chambermaster and we're able to create custom fields within Chambermaster so that we can maintain the information right in our system, but develop a report. To show us what we want to see. However, if you don't use Chambermaster, it's totally fine. You can track all of this on the spreadsheet or in the system that you're working in. But every week we review a pipeline and this share this shows the prospective member's name, the stage that they're in within the sales cycle, and the source. So where they're coming from, whether it was an event, it was an outbound phone call, it was a referral or an ambassador lead. So we're tracking all of that information and looking at that. weekly as we're looking at our prospective pipeline. And on that pipeline we also track you know first contact and that rating that we're talking about, the A, B, or C. So we can view that from week to week. But then I've also developed a separate spreadsheet where we're tracking event attendance and when prospects are showing up at events so that we know which specific events have the best possibility for turning a prospect into a member. And so after looking at that over the last year, we can narrow it down to the two specific events where we see the greatest conversion rate. So we know to drive prospects to those two specific events if we want to see them turn into members. So those are kind of, I'd say our pipeline and this event tracking page is where we really see the best results on tracking where our our the best source for our prospective members would be.
14:49.934 Brandon Burton
I like that you're able to have it all in the one system. So you're not looking, you know, in six different places trying to look at dashboards and trying to see and make sense of the data, but you're able to all pull it into one system and kind of have that snapshot of the the weekly pipeline of how things are coming in and really helps to organize things. You had mentioned you could do it in a spreadsheet or something, but I could see kind of the headache that would come with that. I mean, that would be a full time job, just keeping that spreadsheet up to date.
15:17.454 Britt Delo
Keeping all of them going. Yeah. It it can be a little tricky. And I do recommend though that before you start modifying your system to show some of these custom fields, that you do start with a spreadsheet just so that you don't start throwing stuff in the system and it's like, well, shoot, I wish I would have had this. So sometimes laying it out in a spreadsheet just for the first, you know, couple of weeks even just to say, okay, I I'm liking this information. This is working, and then get it into your system and uploaded so that you can easily run that report week after week.
15:46.958 Brandon Burton
That's a good tip. With every chamber being so different. I mean, there's there's always gonna be some similarity, some level of similarity, but figure out what what those key indicators are gonna be for your chamber and start with that spreadsheet. See, see what those things are that you need to be tracking before you go and and change your whole system. Great tip.
16:05.218 Britt Delo
Yep. Yeah.
16:07.982 Brandon Burton
you're tracking all this in your system, you're keeping track of of these lead sources, seeing how these prospective members are engaging even before they become members. You're seeing where the value is for members by that how they're engaging, all tracking this through your system. So that brings up the great opportunity of being able to really kind of customize that member experience, am I right? As to Yeah. How they experience a chamber. how do you go about kind of customizing that member experience and and putting them in front of the right opportunities that the chamber has to offer?
16:50.892 Britt Delo
Yeah, so it's through that, you know, categorizing and then tracking where the best conversion rates are, then we can start to really deliver targeted communications to those prospects to really get them to take that next step. So I partner with our marketing team to take a look at getting targeted prospect emails out. And what we can do then is because we have them categorized this way, we can, and because we've been tracking information about where the best events that those prospects should go, like where they should show up in order to turn them into members. We partner to send those prospect emails out to our targeted list and invite them then to those couple of events that we find are really, really great events for prospects to attend. So that we're we're delivering a really remarkable experience for them because they feel like this was just know, really handed to them and that they've walked along like, this is a perfect event for me and and then we can do some personal communication in addition to that, with the prospects that it fall that A and B category. So we can do a little extra for them and give them some personal invites in addition to those targeted emails. And it's been working really, really well.
18:08.362 Brandon Burton
I like that. So part of my background that kind of prompted me to to start this podcast is I come from the publishing side. So as a publisher for Chambers of Commerce. And as we would contract with chambers to do their their maps and directories and so forth, we'd we're out in the community. We're talking to the members and I would say gathering data, right? As we're getting feedback from members. And whenever we kick off a a project like that, you know, the chambers always they'll send out an email to their membership saying we're working on the new chamber directory or whatever it is and this is your opportunity to purchase ad space or to get involved or, you know, whatever that message is. Well, as I'm out in the community talking to these members and I ask them, Did you get the the email the chambers sent out about the new chamber directory? And occasionally somebody will say yes. But most of them, the response is, I get so many emails from the chamber, I just I don't even open them. You know, I so hopefully you're not hearing that as much since you're doing these targeted communications. So if you know somebody's interested in in building their workforce develop their workforce talent or somebody's interested in a marketing seminar or whatever they're there at the chamber for and being able to target that communication instead of just overwhelming them with so much. email is a great way to communicate as long as it doesn't get abused, right? So
19:41.486 Britt Delo
Exactly. That's very important.
19:43.438 Brandon Burton
Once we send out, you know, three emails a day to every member and every prospective member that you have emails for, then once the emails come out that really do matter for that business, for that that member, it often will miss because they're they're so overwhelmed with everything else being, you know, bombarded by the chamber. So I think there's a lot of value in targeting that communication and really giving them a the experience that they're looking for and hoping for with the chamber.
20:13.026 Britt Delo
Yeah, Brandon, that's so true. And we continue to refine I mean, it's a it's an ongoing challenge to be able to make sure you're delivering the the appropriate number of emails to the right people. I have to say we we really only have one email a week that goes out to all of membership and everything else we really try to target, whether it's a prospect group or a group that's really looking for educational opportunities or our women's group and that just goes to women in that group. So it We really try to target and and break it down so that not everybody is getting every single email because yeah, you'd be you'd be flooded and people are already flooded with other emails that are coming to their inbox. So it's a very good point.
20:54.51 Brandon Burton
Well and some of those groups are very easy to distinguish, like you said, the women's group or the young professionals group or something, you know, the data's there and it's easy to to sort through and and get those emails out. Are do you guys use any other forms of communication besides email? I'm just out of curiosity.
21:12.584 Britt Delo
it's primarily email. but then, you know, we're also communicate through our blog. We use social media. So we're doing a lot with Facebook, LinkedIn, and some on Instagram. So that's kind of another key thing that we use data for with our social media platforms. in the beginning, our marketing team was just kind of doing everything across a bunch of platforms, and one of them that we were on was Twitter. And we found out that our through, you know, tracking where where members were hanging out and where prospective members were finding us, we found that Twitter wasn't as valuable of a space for us. And it might be for other chambers out there, but we really tracked the data to make sure that we were spending our time on the platforms that would be most effective and ended up, you know, cutting out Twitter and really just honing in on Facebook. LinkedIn and Instagram. So that's another, you know, area that you can use data to track and hopefully save yourself a little time if you're on platforms that aren't as meaningful to your members.
22:17.292 Brandon Burton
That's right. And that could be a whole nother discussion there about social media. But as far as talking about targeted targeted communications, I know there's a lot of targeting that can go on through social media. So I thought it's at least worth a mention in this discussion. but as you how do you how do you go about tracking your results that you have from this whole you know collecting the data, identifying your target markets, prioritizing your prospects? In the end, how do you know? that what you're doing is effective.
22:49.346 Britt Delo
Yeah, so for us it all lives on a scorecard. And we have a couple of different levels within our organization. So we have a corporate scorecard that we review as an entire team at our staff meeting every single Monday morning. and those are kind of the high level key indicators so we can make sure that you know our organization is running smoothly. we we follow a system called EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. And that really defines the work that we do and everything has to live on about a one page scorecard. And the intent with that is, you know, if if one of us is out on a deserted island, we could take a look at that scorecard and we would be able to know if our organization was performing well or not. So these are really the high level key indicators. but then we also track departmental scorecards and this brings it down to you know, it it hones in a little bit. These are it's a little bit more detailed, it gives you really a focus. So for me on that membership side about the key things that are happening in the membership department. when I say department I mean myself and my one other employee, but it you know, it it gives us an idea of the work that we're doing and if we're driving the appropriate results with the activity that we've been engaging in the week prior. So those are kind of the two levels. I mean, you've got all this stuff, all this data you're tracking. you know, we are pulling information from our our system and tracking on spreadsheets, but we compile it all in this one space so we can get a snapshot.
24:24.66 Brandon Burton
All right. So what are since you are in the marketing department, like you mentioned, what are some of those key indicators that you're looking at as far as marketing goes to to track those results?
24:37.768 Britt Delo
so for membership department. So it we're looking at membership numbers and we also collaborate with marketing on their numbers as well. So we're looking at things like how many discovery meetings we've had the week prior. Discovery meetings meaning a a prospective meeting to learn about somebody and and help turn them into a member. We're looking at our total membership count for the week. We're looking at our total revenue broken down by both year to day and for the month prior. we're looking at how many prospects were at events the the month prior. So that's something that we're we're tracking on on our own and then bringing it up to that scorecard level to review with the team. So it's a lot of different things that we're we're looking at. And you know, sometimes this is really a a living document, our scorecard is because we track things for a while and then realize, you know what? I I don't know if that matters. And maybe it did matter, but now it the issue is fixed and and we can move on from that number. So this scorecard, it changes. I mean you have to track something long enough to really get an idea of the progress and where you're at. But this is really a a living breathing document that changes as our organization changes. So that's that's something to keep in mind too as you look at a scorecard. It doesn't have to be perfectly right the first time. It's once you start tracking that information, you can see where the trends are and start to make adjustments based on that information.
26:12.31 Brandon Burton
That's right. So I I asked that question just to maybe spur some ideas. So those that are listening can can hear some of that data that you're collecting, some of those results that you're tracking. And it may not be exactly something you said, but it spurs a thought for them of something else that they should collect data on and and track results for. And and I love how you said that it it may be, you know, six months down the road, a year down the road, you find that that particular data set that you're you've been collecting doesn't really it's not really applicable. for the the goals that you have in mind. So keep adjusting that. But it you can't make those adjustments unless you have that data. So start just start collecting at the beginning and then see where those correlations are, see what what things matter, and then see where you really need to kind of nail down the those important key indicators to get the results that you're looking for at your chamber. So Britt, as we start wrapping things up here, I wanted to ask you, you've shared a lot of great information for the this chamber professionals listening today, but I wanted to ask you if you could take maybe one action item based you know from our discussion today that a chamber professional can do to kind of take their chamber up to the next level, what would that piece of advice be?
27:29.894 Britt Delo
Yeah, Brandon, and you kind of even just summarize it a little bit. I think the key takeaway would be just start tracking something. it can seem so overwhelming. I am not a numbers person really at all. I'm a relationship builder. That's what I do. but I'm now kind of geeking out over these numbers because I can see the improvements you can make and how you can build and grow when you have the information. So don't let the numbers scare you away or kind of the vast. see of all the possibilities of what you could track. just start with with one thing, whether it's identifying your target market and and starting there, whether it's tracking prospects at events, just start with something and see where that takes you. I think that's the the best way to to begin is just to start.
28:17.006 Brandon Burton
That's right. Just start. And a lot of our discussion today has been based around membership since that's kind of your wheelhouse that you're in. But take this to your programs level. You know, what what things does your chamber need as far as programs go? Listen to your members, you know, put out those surveys, collect that data, and really provide experience for your members and and programs that they need, not just what you want as a a chamber. or what you think that would be good for the community, find out what those needs are, use your data, ask those questions, collect it, and then see what the needs are. So Britt, as we I I ask this question to everyone I have on the show, and I I love getting the answers, but as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you view their purpose going forward?
29:06.158 Britt Delo
Yeah, so going forward, I see the purpose of chambers it really growing and expanding because I think now more than ever there's a need for businesses to come together and to have a space to do that. you know, whether it's online or, you know, in person, the chamber is really kind of three things. I see the chamber as a catalyst for growth, as a convener of leaders and influencers. And the chamber is a we're champions for thriving business community. So that's what I see kind of the key things that the chamber of the future and and of now, what we're creating now, really is.
29:49.346 Brandon Burton
Be in a three C chamber and get away from being in the three P chamber. That's right. Yep.
29:55.286 Britt Delo
Yep. And that's something we've really been focusing on. within, you know, the last six months we've even started using this language with our members so that they can really see it and feel it. And we've gotten really positive feedback from our members saying that they can, you know, just by putting that out there and verbalizing it and helping our members and our community understand that that's what we're we're working towards for our community, they're really buying into it and jumping on board as well. So it it's it's really working.
30:24.172 Brandon Burton
Love that. Using that language with your members because you're right. I mean, chamber to chamber, everybody knows the three C's now, but your members may still have a different perspective of what the chamber should do. So if you communicate that this is what our goal is and get them on board to see how that benefits them and your community, that's that's key. So thank you for sharing that. I didn't even see that coming. So great stuff. So Britt, if anyone listening has any questions about what you shared today or about how you guys are doing things there at the at the Michigan West Coast Chamber, how might they get in contact with you, reach out to you and and kind of follow up with any of this discussion?
31:04.724 Britt Delo
Yeah, so our website is West Coastchamber.org and all of our contact info and everything is on our website. if you'd like to email me, my email is Brit B-R-I-T at West Coastchamber.org.
31:25.582 Brandon Burton
All right. And I will get all of that on the show notes page for this episode also, which can be found at Chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode fifty-five. But Britt, I just wanted to thank you so much for spending some time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast and for what you had to provide to the listeners out there. And it just thank you so much.
31:47.81 Britt Delo
Yeah, Brandon, thank you so much for having me. It was so much fun. I hope you all have a great day out there.
31:54.902 Brandon Burton
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This transcript has been lightly edited for readability and to correct obvious transcription errors while preserving the meaning of the original conversation.

Episode 54 — Staff Retention with Jessica Welch
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Jessica Welch
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.884 Brandon Burton
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.
00:16.28 Brandon Burton
He typically runs between 15 to 20 miles a week. He's my dad, Brandon Burton. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. This is Brandon Burton, your host, and it's my goal to help introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. This is episode 54 of Chamber Chat Podcast, and today we're happy to have Jessica Welch with us. Who's the VP of operations at the Greater Irvine Chamber of Commerce in California? And just a side note, maybe interesting fact, is I actually lived in Irvine about 15 years ago. never met Jessica while I was there, but but I did live in Irvine. So it just shows what a small world the the chamber community is. But Jessica began her career at the ch in the chamber industry in 2007 with the Greater Irvine Chamber. as an executive assistant to the president and CEO, working closely with the Board of Directors, Executive and Governmental Affairs Committees. In 2012, she was promoted to Programs Director, where she managed at all greater urban chamber events, generating over 30% of the annual budget. In July of 2017, Jessica was promoted to Senior Director of Operations, overseeing investor relations, member services, events, Office management and strategic planning. In September 2018, she was promoted to Vice President of Operations, at which time she spearheaded the efforts, resulting in the Chamber earning a five-star accreditation by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She was recognized by the California Women's Leadership Association, a statewide organization committed to bringing together influent influential women to effect meaningful change in our communities. As a twenty eighteen Woman to Watch, Jessica serves on the board of the Western Association of Chamber Executives, the WACE Foundation, the WACE Academy Steering Committee, and is a regular speaker at the annual conferences. She graduated from WACE's three-year academy in twenty sixteen. Jessica received the WACE's Gerald W. Hathaway Award in february twenty nineteen.
02:39.542 Brandon Burton
Recognized for significant contributions to chamber and community development, as well as the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives 2019 40 under 40 award. She serves on the ACCE Idea Lab Task Force as well as her Metro Major Senior Staff Peer Group and is a graduate from the U.S. Chamber West Institute for Organization Management. Jessica currently studies at Bradman University and resides in Tuston, California. Where she serves on the board of her daughter's softball league. Today, as Jessica's with us on the on the podcast, we're going to be talking about the importance of staff retention and how to go about retaining those great employees you have at your chamber. And we'll dive right into this conversation as soon as we get back from hearing from our sponsor. Every chamber is looking for new ways to increase their non-dues revenue. Has your chamber found a good affinity program? I have a great affinity program to offer your chamber that will continue to increase in revenue year after year. I want to introduce you to Swipe It for all of your credit card processing needs. Swipe It has a unique affinity program that 1. Lowers your credit card processing fees at the chamber, 2 Helps your chamber members be more profitable, and three, provides recurring non-dues revenue to your chamber. To learn more, please visit chamberchatpodcast.com slash C C for credit card. Again, Chamberchatpodcast.com slash C C and get swiping with swipe it. Okay, Jessica, we are back. Thank you for joining us today. on ChamberTap Podcast. If you would please say hello to the audience and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know Jessica Welch a little bit better.
04:36.078 Jessica Welch
Hi Brandon, thank you for having me on the podcast today. And hi everybody. I I significantly realized that I need to cut down my bio quite a bit. That was pretty extensive. And I sat here for quite some time trying to figure out what interesting thing I could share. And I had a little help. I do have an impressive amount of shoes, probably more than I have clothes, and I consider myself a Netflix junkie.
05:01.25 Brandon Burton
All right. A Netflix junkie with a lot of shoes to wear. So that's that's interesting. I always Yeah, it could be. There there are worse habits out there. All right, Jessica. If you could just take a moment and share with us a little bit about the Greater Irvine Chamber, maybe an example of the the size, location, budget, kind of where you sit, and about the Irvine community in general. So we can all relate a little bit better to.
05:32.28 Jessica Welch
Sure. So we have eighteen team members here, largest we've ever been. We've been experiencing s significant growth over the past three years or so. Our budget is four point six million. Our organization is unique among chambers in that it includes destination Irvine, often referred to as a CBB. they partner with the tourism and hospitality industry to brand and promote Irvine as a destination for groups. For sporting events, leisure visitors, and business travelers. So I'm sure you've run into a lot of chambers that have CVBs associated. Those are typically your larger ones, and we're very fortunate to have such a great partnership. They're housed right in the same building with us, just a couple doors down from my office. We have 750 members. 30% of our members are outside of Irvine, hence why we changed our name to Greater Irvine Chamber just a couple of years ago. Irvine is considered the heart of Orange County. It's about 15 minutes from Disneyland. Our organization was also to toot our own horn named Best Place to Work in Orange County for two consecutive years. We're really proud of that. I think that's what inspires me to talk about these kinds of topics because during that process, all of our employees were surveyed individually. So the winners that are chosen for this particular award by the Orange County Business Journal, it they're all based on what their employees say about working there. So that's kind of a pride pride moment for us.
06:58.774 Brandon Burton
Yeah, that's awesome. I know I know you guys are doing great things there at the Greater Irvine Chamber, but it it doesn't hurt that you're in a great location. I mean, it doesn't i i there's not a a more beautiful area than than that part of Southern California, Orange County. Absolutely. You've got the mountains, you've got the beach, you got everything right there. So it is a great location. And for those of you who haven't been to Irvine, it's like like Jessica said, it is very close to Disneyland, John Wayne Airport and It really just really is a great location, lots of good shopping. So go visit and spend lots of money there too. We'll take good. That's right. So as we get on to our topic for discussion today, we we're gonna focus our discussion around staff retention. Now, I know that this topic is not addressed very often in the chamber industry, but there is a lot of resources that go into hiring a new staff member, a lot of training. for new employees. So why do you think this topic is not addressed very often and why is it so important to you?
08:06.446 Jessica Welch
Well, you know, you think about working for a chamber of commerce, I feel like we all have a pretty strong love for what we do. let's be frank, no one's in it for the money, you know. Yeah, exactly. It's a passionate job. Most chambers just can't offer competitive salaries. And so what this discussion is about is compensating for that and how do we retain the top talent without having top dollar to go along with it? And to your question, I think
08:17.616 Brandon Burton
Like a school teacher.
08:35.789 Jessica Welch
Part of the reason that this isn't discussed very often is because look, we're busy people. We're busy trying to hit our membership numbers. We're trying to run events. You know, a lot of us are just flying by the by our hats at that point and trying to to have a discussion about staff retention kind of seems to take the back burner. So I'm I'm seeing a lot more focus on this as I attend other conferences and events and I love that I'm I'm seeing it kind of come to the front burner. So hopefully I can try and do that for some of our chamber friends as well.
09:07.522 Brandon Burton
Yeah, and you mentioned that in the chamber industry, you don't necessarily get paid for the kind of quality that you put out there and and for really the impact that you have in the community. And for those of you that follow Frank Kenny online, probably through Facebook is where most people associate with Frank Kenney, but he had put out an article a few months back that I remember reading through that he had mentioned how chamber CEOs the salary that they get paid is usually very drastically less, much drastic, much less, what am I trying to say here? Much less than that of for example, a school superintendent or city manager or others that are in their same circle of you know network and often working towards some of the same goals. And his the whole purpose of that article was trying to kind of move that pendulum to where chamber people should be paid what they deserve. And so I know that's a a topic and discussion, you know, beyond our pay grade and and for a different day. But i i it just knowing that that fact is out there, I know it it helps to get creative in the benefits that are offered and ways that you go about retaining employees. So I I know I've seen this meme several times through social media. I'm sure you've seen something similar, but it goes to the effect that people don't quit jobs, they quit toxic work cultures. Do you I was gonna ask if you believe that and what are maybe some other reasons or examples as to why a person might quit a job at the chamber?
10:47.35 Jessica Welch
Yeah, you're you're very right. And and it's not always about money. like I said, people do this because they love it. So if it's not about the money and we're losing people and there's turnover, what what is it? So, you know, there's a lot of studies being done recently. I'm I'm doing a workshop with Chris Romer from Vale Valley Valley at the WACE conference on this topic specifically, and he's gonna dive a lot more into the details, but some of the more common things that we're seeing Aside from salary is lack of benefits, whether that be, you know, hard benefits or maybe it's more of a culture, engagement, you know, getting buy-in from your team members, trust in your employers. I mean, that's huge. I if you can't have that, what I don't understand what you would have. respect and work-life balance. I mean, we hear about that all the time. there's a lot of fatigue going on, especially with chamber executives, because there's not enough work-life balance.
11:44.918 Brandon Burton
Now I was gonna ask, is that such a thing in the chamber industry to have a work life balance?
11:51.246 Jessica Welch
No, it it's it's a funny question, but it's a good question. And I I think what I've I've learned to embrace is and I'm not recommending this to anyone. I feel like I'm always working in some way or another. I'm always answering someone's email or I'm alre always taking someone's phone call. And that's okay, you know, seven days a week, but y you have to make time for yourself at some point. So and that's a whole nother discussion about what kind of vacations you should go on. But you know, there has to be some some downtime where you can let go.
12:20.664 Brandon Burton
Vacations are are great and important, but also I think there's probably some kind of barriers that need to be put up in order to have some kind of a balance. And I don't think it's gonna be a perfect balance, but to be able to kind of carve out some personal time. For sure. are there certain things that you see work for you or that you've seen work for other chamber staff to kind of carve out that personal time and to not be you know For lack of a better word, bothered with those emails or phone calls that come in at all hours of the day and night.
12:52.696 Jessica Welch
I mean, it's a personal choice really, Brandon. I don't think that there's a solution for it. you and I talked about some of these best practices and how it starts at the top with the CEO. This kind of leads into our conversation about culture. you know, your team is gonna look to you as the CEO or to your CEO and watch what you do. and if you're accessible at all hours of the night, you know, people are gonna mirror that a lot. So and that that kind of leads into some stuff I think is really important when it comes with our CEO and with the culture. Any kind of benefit, whether it's monetary, non-monetary, work-life balance, that starts at the top and it has to trickle its way down. you know, we talk about servant leadership. There's been a lot of conversations about that as opposed to the archaic leadership where it's top-down control. Servant leadership is from the bottom up an empowerment, you know, and you go into the dangers of micromanaging, which is what that archaic leadership can can lead into. And this is actually when a lot of that burnout happens. There's there's no trust. You you start doing things because you don't think anyone else can do it as well, or you don't trust anyone to do it. And then your team doesn't trust you. So it goes back up to those reasons why people leave. You know, trust was definitely one of them. micromanaging can just be detrimental to to an executive.
14:17.984 Brandon Burton
Yeah, it it creates that toxic work culture that people try to run away from. Absolutely. so along the lines with turnover, I mean it slows production, it can be costly. What are some things to to look out for and to maybe try to avoid with having turnover? I know there's I mean, do you have some examples or or ways that Things that that chambers should should just look out for when it comes to turnover and trying to avoid some some of those costs that come along with it.
14:54.158 Jessica Welch
Sure. you mentioned cost. I mean, I think that's something that companies don't look at, not realizing that yes, if you lose somebody, you're gonna have to go and replace them and take the time to do that and retrain them. And man, that's that's backstepping so far, but it's also very expensive. You know, a lot of times you'll have to come into a staffing agency. There's vacation or sick payouts if someone's resigning, you know, termination packets and all of these things that That can be really time consuming and and actual cost you money. So, I mean, there's a lot of things you can do. I wouldn't say things to look out for, but things to do proactively to ensure that your team loves working there. there's I mean, things like like team building, that's one thing I actually advise against. Okay. I'm very anti-team building, and I'll tell you why. You know, none of these trust falls, none of these. you know, communication strategies, everyone feels out of form. I I feel like they're really dangerous. they can put people on the spot, they can make people uncomfortable, they can be embarrassed. You're making people share things they don't want to share. And I personally they're just they're just ridiculous. So an egg exting example is I always recommend to do something fun with your team. you know do something real with them. We I mentioned we're close to Disneyland. We do things quarterly. We took our team to Disneyland last year for a day. a couple months ago we went on a salsa making cruise or or we're just got a happy hour or something like that. You know, they're they're very lighthearted and it just gives people the opportunity to get to know each other, to get to know you as a CEO, which is really important. But it's not stuffy and people really appreciate that.
16:43.008 Brandon Burton
Yeah. And I think along those lines, I've recently interviewed a couple of people about leadership visits or inner city visits and chamber travel events. And along those lines, that's where you really develop those relationships. When you get outside of the office and whether it's with you know other chamber members or leaders in the community, or in this case with with the other staff there at your chamber, to get outside of your normal day to day routine and environment. And go do something fun. Create some kind of memory together and create some kind of bonding experience that you can relate back to. Sometimes there's inside jokes that come from that or you know, just something that that builds a relationship from it. So I think that's a great example.
17:27.778 Jessica Welch
And they don't always have to be costly. I mean, I mentioned Disneyland, which obviously is has a high dollar ticket associated with it, but I mean we have we have scooters in our office, the little like push your own scooter thing. And you know, on a Friday when there's no members hanging around, the girls will use them to go back and forth up and down the hallway. And, you know, we have a huge connect four set or you know, some people have game rooms and it doesn't need to be super costly to be fun.
17:54.446 Brandon Burton
That's right. That's right. So so you had shared with me the idea of trying something real. What are some examples of trying something real to be able to to have that good work environment?
18:10.99 Jessica Welch
Well, some of the non monetary benefits that I've been looking at and seeing other chambers do, which is great. It's so awesome to be seeing people doing these. paid time off. You would think that would be a no brainer, but there's actually organizations out there that don't provide it. Vacation time off, sick time off, that's so important. It goes back to that taking care of ourselves, the wellness. having flexible schedules, you know. We all we all have a life, or at least we try to. So, you know, if if we need to take off a day and work extra here and I think as, you know, coming like I said from the CEO, top down, those are the kinds of flexibilities that are really important and show people that you have trust in them. You know they're doing their jobs. You know, it's not a micromanaging thing. one thing that we implemented a year ago is a volunteer time off policy where we give our team members twenty four hours and they can use them however they would like to go and volunteer at a member charity organization. so we encourage them, a a nonprofit if you will. So, you know, we encourage them to get out in the community and to be a part of it and have ownership on the community that we're all trying to market.
19:23.776 Brandon Burton
Yeah. I like that. That's a great idea. And it it doesn't really cost a whole lot, but it gets them out in the community. It's gonna strengthen that relationship too with that member nonprofit organization. And again, it changes that environment of where that member's at and that scenery that they're seeing every day. That that's a great idea. Well, and a lot of these non monetary benefits is the opportunity where you can really get creative.
19:44.75 Jessica Welch
Absolutely.
19:52.012 Brandon Burton
with what you have to offer and have you ever I don't know if a survey would be the right thing, but being able to try to get feedback from employees to see what would be a value to them to kind of fit in this non monetary benefits category.
20:10.732 Jessica Welch
Haven't done a survey, if you will. that's actually what the Orange County Business Journal kind of did when they were assessing for the best place to work. I do ask everyone for feedback when we're coordinating our staff activities like Disneyland and the salsa making crews. Like I let everyone vote on it and say, What do you want to do? and provide some suggestions. And I mean, I'll be honest, Brandon, it's kind of just let's just try it and see if people like it, you know, a lot of times. You know, a lot of chambers are and we are too family friendly. You know, sometimes my kids will need to come with me into the office for a few hours and you know, everyone's great with that. It's it's never a deal. And the the gentleman next to me in the office next to me does it as well. My my dog comes to work with me most days and hangs out in my office. And I know Chris Romer is a pet friendly office as well. I think a lot of places are going towards that. Animals bring smiles to people's faces. I highly recommend a pet friendly office.
21:08.962 Brandon Burton
Yeah. I know for a while my wife was a paralegal, actually they're in Irvine and her law office that she worked at had a couple dogs that were, you know, the the the partner attorneys brought their dogs into the office and when we had our first kid, they let her bring our son into the office until he was about a year old, you know, until he got a little too loud and a little too mobile. But But that culture that it created there in that office, you're right. The dogs and babies, they bring smiles and they don't have to be that big of a distraction. it really creates a a good environment to be in.
21:45.986 Jessica Welch
I agree. And you know, it isn't all about having fun. Just like it's not all about what the salary is. I think it's it's really important for for CEOs and executives and supervisors to really have a value on professional development as well. You know, you want your team to grow. If you're gonna retain the top talent, it's for them to stay up top, they have to keep sharp. All of their skills need to be sharpened. And I always recommend everyone go to, you know, ACCE and WACE for all of the the nuggets that they have there. But, you know, you knowing that your organization values something like professional develop development, that's how you attract the right kind of in-demand candidates. you boost your employees' job satisfaction. And quite frankly, you can make succession planning a lot easier, you know, if that's something you value. And unfortunately, nine times out of ten, a budget for staff development is one of the top line items chambers don't have, or it's the first thing that they'll cut if they need to be making budget cuts. I was at I was at institute a couple of years ago, the US Chambers Institute, and I overheard somebody saying they were going to ask their board if they could go to the WACE conference. And my mind was blown a little bit. I was like, What do you mean you're gonna ask your board? You know, you set the expectation that this is important to you. You build it into your budget. It's so important to be doing that.
23:10.006 Brandon Burton
That's right. Now the professional development is so important. And well, as I read your bio leading into this interview, you've kind of gone right up the ranks there at the Irvine Chamber. And I'm sure a lot of that had to do with being exposed as professional development, being able to put be put in these situations where you could continue moving along in your career path. And being able to provide those opportunities to others is gonna make them wanna stick around and give them purpose as they work in their position.
23:40.352 Jessica Welch
Absolutely. It shows that you value your team when you want them to grow. And look, you don't want anyone to leave, but if they do leave, I mean, at least you've given them that, you know, and they'll thank you for that.
23:52.546 Brandon Burton
Yeah, they're gonna leave on on a good note if they if they do that. Absolutely. So maybe kind of along the lines with the the culture at your chamber, what do performance reviews look like and and how do you go about maybe showing well, just performance reviews. We'll we'll cover that. Yeah.
24:14.744 Jessica Welch
Yeah, absolutely. So I I'm I hope everyone does regular reviews. Chris Romer actually does something very different I learned the other day. He does something quarterly, which is really interesting. So for those of you attending in February, you'll learn more about A couple years ago, we started doing something very different. We had your old school fill out your form, rate yourself, that whole business, and we went away with that. So there's no forms, there's no rating scales. I ask the team members to create a report on their progress, their accomplishments, their goals, professional development. and it's sent to their if it's peop people I oversee, sent to me ahead of time. I go through it, I pick out a few things to highlight and to talk about and to Congratulate them on but the bulk of the discussion is really about job satisfaction or professional development opportunities. And then if there's challenges that I can help with or tools that they need, whether it be education or I mean actual physical things, new screens, new computers, new technology, that it really becomes more of a conversation as opposed to a time for criticism, because it seems like that's really where most of those go. And I'm a big believer that if you have a problem with a team member, their review should never be the first time they're hearing about it.
25:33.247 Brandon Burton
I couldn't agree more. That's that's so important. And I like the idea that that performance review becomes more of a discussion rather than just performance. It's about the equipment they have to use and what it is that can make their job more productive and more successful.
25:48.652 Jessica Welch
Yeah, absolutely. These are they're great opportunities to talk to your team about other things they'd like to explore too. maybe they're interested in in doing events instead of doing membership, even if there's not a new position for them to move into. You know, the industry we're in, we have the the flexibility to be creative about growth opportunities. And so we're our teams can exercise all the skills they're developing and have a chance to do something else and really just sharpen their knowledge.
26:16.908 Brandon Burton
That's right. Now, how do you go about showing appreci appreciation for employees that are doing a great job and that you wanna show the value of what they bring to the to the office?
26:29.464 Jessica Welch
Sure. I I always say it's like vote early and vote often, you know, s say thank you early and often. All the time. Anytime you have an opportunity, our organizations do great things. So we need to be giving recognition for those who do the great things. It's not on one of us. None of us can take the credit for all of that. So whether it's internally at a staff meeting, to the members, especially to your board of directors, recognizing your team in front of your board of directors is really important. I mean, that really gives an opportunity for them to get to know you. But the three things that I feel need to be kept in mind is to tailor to the recipient. some people might just like a fist bump, others prefer an email. some people don't really like public recognition. And so, you know, going back to the team building and things like that, we've got you have to be careful and sensitive to those preferences. Yeah. be personal and individualized. And then of course be genuine and authentic. You know, your tone of voice, your facial expressions, your posture, that all has to match what's being conveyed verbally.
27:35.93 Brandon Burton
Absolutely. Those are great points and hopefully everybody took notes of those. You can hit that backup button for about 15 seconds and hear that again. so you had touched on some of these non-monetary benefits that that you can offer and kind of have some creativity with. What are some of the monetary side that you can kind of frame and and kind of put out there to retain some of these good employees?
28:01.102 Jessica Welch
First and foremost, definitely do yourself a favor and do research on what other positions similar to that outside of the industry are making because if you don't, your employees are. That's just a fact. So save save yourself that embarrassment and at least know where you stand. sometimes I don't think it makes any difference to look at what other chambers are paying. I think really you need to have an idea of what other companies are paying so that you can know what's in the area. so that's obviously being aware of that. bonus structures I think are are and an incentive programs are really important. I'm sure most people have a membership commission structure of some point. So having thresholds there, you know, not you get this much percentage, but having some creativity w and incentive to go higher and to go over and above. we have that with our director of events. She she's able to get a percentage of all the sponsorships she gets over and above budget. And that's I mean that's done huge for her over the past year. So things where you may not have that budgeted, but if it's a it's a matter of going over your actual budget, that's not eating away at it.
29:17.652 Brandon Burton
No. And if I mean if that ends up being found money by being able to increase the sponsorships or things like that, exactly. Then then reward that employee for for doing that extra effort and going above and beyond. That just makes perfect sense.
29:31.776 Jessica Welch
And it you can apply that to really anybody in the office, you know, have a small stipend for somebody that brings in a member that's not your membership salesperson, you know, whether it's at the front desk or, you know, have those little incentives all over so that people always have in the back of their head the company in mind and knowing that doing that can benefit them.
29:51.264 Brandon Burton
Yeah. So I like that idea of being able to incentivize any staff member for bringing in a new member, but how do you go about having that competition from your membership director versus any other staff member that's bringing in new members?
30:05.838 Jessica Welch
So we have a rule that if our membership director is in the office, all inquiries go to him. If he is not in the office and someone comes in and just says, here's a check I want to pay, whoever's taking care of that is allowed to take that commission. So there just needs it needs to be very clear that they didn't come in just asking for things and our membership director would follow up with them later. They came in with a check. He wasn't here, somebody else took care of them.
30:34.542 Brandon Burton
So your membership director eats a lot of lunches in the office. Right. That's what I got after that. Very good. So I think all of these are very good ideas and ways to be able to retain these great employees that you work so hard to get in the first place. do you have any advice or tips for these employees that you know, what are some signs? that maybe they're struggling and maybe looking to jump ship.
31:09.966 Jessica Welch
I mean, qu silence is never a good thing. You really want to be engaging with your team and just even just going in saying, you know, hey, how was your weekend and and talking to them and it's amazing what things people will bring up if you just start a conversation with them. and that's I think that's so important. There's not everyone's gonna have a red flag that they wanna leave, but I mean, taking extra time off, not really You can tell when people care about their job, when they're interested, when they're engaged, you know, so looking at those kinds of hints, but you know, that goes back to just recognizing the need for this conversation and making people aware that if you lose somebody, it's a problem in so many ways for you. And it can be avoided.
31:56.098 Brandon Burton
That's right. And I think so much, especially in the chamber industry, we're so worried and concerned about retaining members that oftentimes we overlook retaining the great employees that we have. But let's apply some of those tactics that we use to retain members and apply them to our employees. So Jessica, as we start wrapping things up here, I wanted to ask if you had one action item.
32:09.73 Jessica Welch
You're absolutely right.
32:24.066 Brandon Burton
that chamber a chamber professional who's listening can do based on our discussion to help take their chamber up to the next level.
32:32.342 Jessica Welch
Most of the pushback that I've heard when talking about implementing a lot of the things I mentioned is we don't have the budget for that. so I I challenge everybody to think outside the box and be open-minded to trying things that may be low or no cost, but really focus on that culture. The culture is everything. And again, that like I mentioned, that starts with a CEO who understands. how important it is to have that close knit team. So thinking outside the box on how you can create opportunities for your team members to engage with each other and to enjoy what they do every day.
33:15.342 Brandon Burton
Love it. Get outside that box. Yep. So the question I ask everyone that I have on the show is as we look to the future, how do you see the future of chambers of commerce and their purpose going forward?
33:29.816 Jessica Welch
Well, it's a it's a hopeful site. I what I would love to see a lot more chambers evolving into is really the three the three C's that WACE talks about, the convener, catalysts, and champions, and primarily the champions for their communities. We all have the same goal to ensure that our communities thrive. so let's be a voice for these entities that make up our regions. You know, our our healthcare, our school systems, you know, really pivot your marketing and and start talking about the great things and the great reasons there are to live and to do business where your chamber is located. And I I guarantee you there will be that will come full circle. So I hope that we see a lot more of that marketing strategy kind of change over the next few years. I'm seeing it. So I'm looking forward to more.
34:21.004 Brandon Burton
That's right. I appreciate that. Now, for anyone who's listening who might have some questions about how to retain great staff or questions about what you discussed today and some of the outside the box ideas that you've mentioned, what's a a good way that or ways that people can get in contact with you and maybe continue this discussion offline?
34:44.717 Jessica Welch
Sure, my email is JWELCH at Irvine Chamber dot com. As I mentioned before, I unfortunately am never away from it, so you can reach me anytime there. And my direct line is nine four nine five zero two four one one five.
35:02.506 Brandon Burton
All right. We will get that contact information updated in the show notes for this episode, which will be found at Chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode fifty-four. And Jessica, I just wanted to thank you so much for spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast and for bringing your experience and background and all of these tips and words of wisdom that you had to share with us today. I think it's a lot of value that other chamber professionals can can and should. apply into their chamber to help retain some of those great staff. So thanks for sharing that with us.
35:37.612 Jessica Welch
the pleasure's been mine. Thank you for the opportunity, Brandon. I really appreciate it.
35:42.774 Brandon Burton
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This transcript has been lightly edited for readability and to correct obvious transcription errors while preserving the meaning of the original conversation.

Episode 53 — Community Development Projects with Jodie Perry
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Jodie Perry
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.842 Brandon Burton
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.
00:14.414 Jodie Perry
And I'm your host. He's celebrating the first anniversary of Chamber Chat Podcast this week. He's my dad, Brandon Burton.
00:27.074 Brandon Burton
Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. This is Brandon Burton, your host, and it's my goal to help introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. In the introduction for this episode, you just heard my my daughter Addy mention that this is the one year mark for Chamber Chat Podcasts. I'm excited to celebrate one year going strong at this with Being consistent with one episode each week and and being able to meet and interview a lot of different chamber professionals from across the country. It's really been a treat to do this, and I'm just having a blast. But in this episode today, this is episode 53. And our guest today is Jodie Perry. And Jody is at the Richland Area Chamber in Ohio. And Jodi has served as the president and CEO of the Richland Area Chamber and Economic Development in Mansfield, Ohio since July 2014. In 2017, she also took over leadership for the Richland Community Development Group. In this combined role, she's responsible for leading the countywide economic, community, and workforce development efforts. Prior to this position, Jodi led the Greece, New York. and Van Wert, Ohio area chambers of commerce, and also served as staff at the Ashland Area Chamber of Commerce in Ohio. She also worked as deputy as the deputy chief clerk for the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. Jody received her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Religion from Ashland University. In 2008, she graduated from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Organizational Management, earning the IOM designation. In 2018, she received the certified chamber executive designation. Distinction. Jody received the 2019 Athena Award for Richland County. She is on the Board of Trustees for the Institute of Organizational Management and Vice Chair for the Chamber of Commerce Executives of Ohio. The importance of business was instilled in Jodi at a young age as she grew up in a family of entrepreneurs in Rochester, New York.
02:45.122 Brandon Burton
We will have a discussion with Jodi today around community development since that is her primary target and and goal with her position. And we'll jump right into this discussion as soon as we get back from hearing from our sponsor. Every chamber is looking for new ways to increase their non-dues revenue. Has your chamber found a good affinity program? I have a great affinity program to offer your chamber that will continue to increase in revenue year after year. I want to introduce you to Swipe It for all of your credit card processing needs. Swipeit has a unique affinity program that 1. Lowers your credit card processing fees at the chamber, 2. helps your chamber members be more profitable, and 3 provides recurring non-dues revenue to your chamber. To learn more, please visit chamberchappodcast.com slash cc for credit card. Again, chamber tappodcast.com slash C C and get swiping with swipe it. Okay, Jody, we are back. Thank you for being with us today as we celebrate one year of Chambertap Podcast. if you would take a moment and say hello to the audience and share something inter interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
04:07.48 Jodie Perry
Sure. Well, thanks for having me, Brandon, and congrats on one year. That's that's a big accomplishment. And I can only imagine the amount of work that goes in. So thanks for doing this. It's it's a great opportunity for for our colleagues for sure. I'm super excited to be here. And geez, let's see, something exciting about me. Well, you know, I'm a a proud dog mom to a rescue dog. named Liz Elizabeth Bennett. So I'm a a Jane Austen fan and she keeps me on my toes. and I love rescuing dogs whenever I can.
04:47.544 Brandon Burton
That's great. I always like getting these little tidbits from people that I interview. J facts that you don't know about people. So that's great. Thank you. Yeah. well, can you take just a moment and share with us a little bit about the Richland Area Chamber? so everyone can relate a little bit better. size, location, budget, just so we can know the perspective you're coming from as we talk about community development projects today.
05:12.686 Jodie Perry
Sure. So we are located, we represent Richland County, Ohio. our largest city is Mansfield, Ohio. And so we're located right between Cleveland and Columbus and Ohio. People know, tend to know those cities a little bit more. our chamber is a decent size. We have 1,010 members as of today. And we have a staff of nine. and we're actually combined entity. So you you kind of mentioned that in the in the bio, but we have the chamber itself is C6. We have a a C three that focuses on economic and workforce development. We actually have a second C three, a chamber foundation. So between all three entities, we we're around a million dollar budget. So it keeps us busy and we I love it. I I've been here about five and a half five and a half years. and it's just it's It's been a lot of fun.
06:13.794 Brandon Burton
Great. That's awesome. That yeah, that helps to give some perspective of kind of what the Mansfield area and Richland area chambers look looks like. so I've mentioned a couple of times that our topic for discussion today is going to be around community development projects. And you just mentioned that Mansfield is one of the the larger cities in your area. And and you guys recently have kind of had an undertaking community development project called Mansfield Rising. Can you tell us a little bit about the background about Mansfield Rising and what the the need was, what the purpose was for Mansfield Rising?
06:55.086 Jodie Perry
Sure. So, you know, I'm gonna start this by by telling you, you know, we're we're a a small to mid sized city. so our our county population is about a hundred and twenty one thousand. The city of Mansfield's just shy of fifty thousand. a manufacturing town that has been the backbone of our economy for for many, many years. And we kind of serve as a regional hub. between those those two larger cities I mentioned before. So shopping, healthcare, all of that, we we tend to be a draw from counties surrounding us. but our community was hit pretty hard by the recession. That was before I I was living here, but they you know everyone was but we had a a a rather large plant closing during that time and so things got maybe slightly worse here. our city went into fiscal emergency at the time And so we've been kind of behind the a-ball for a while. so things have certainly been improving. And about two years ago, took a call from the editor of our local online newspaper. And he said, you know, we like many chambers offer an overseas trip, right? And and that year in 2017, we happen to be promoting a go to Spain with the chamber. And Jay Alred called me and he said, Hey Jody, we have you ever thought of sponsoring a chamber trip to the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas? And I was like, Nope, never thought about it, but I'd be interested in going, so let's talk more. And so set up a meeting with him and we chatted, and that kind of went from us thinking about sponsoring a trip to take people to Let's go talk to our community foundation about underwriting a trip to send people there, to kind of expose them to the up-and-coming ideas that are happening.
08:55.51 Brandon Burton
It's not just an excuse to go party at South Bank.
08:57.61 Jodie Perry
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And to be honest with you, when we decided this, I was kind of like, Well, I'm game for anything, but there's no way they're gonna say yes to this. and it just so happened that at the same time the foundation had been having some internal conversations saying, you know, we like what we're seeing happening in downtown Mansfield, but it's not happening quick enough. And we'd like to make some investments there to spur things. but they weren't sure what to do. So when we came and talked to them, they said, you know what, we like your idea, but we want to give it a purpose. And so that's really how Mansfield Rising got started was they went out on a limb and underwrote a grant from us, or a grant to us rather, to take 15 community leaders, existing community leaders, and then what I would call the unusual suspects. to South by Southwest with the express school of coming back and writing a plan to revitalize our downtown area.
10:02.344 Brandon Burton
All right. So was that the overall goal you'd say is to be able to come back and have a plan for the revitalizing the downtown area? I guess what what was that overall goal goal look like as far as the revitalization? What did you want to see out of it?
10:18.542 Jodie Perry
Well well, we had seen, you know, there had been work happening in our downtown for for twenty years. we have a carousel in our downtown, and when that was put in years ago, Literally, there was a campaign in the community that's that was so against it. They had bumper stickers that said, last one out of Mansfield, turn off the carousel. Like it was just like it kind of gives you an insight into the mindset here at the time. And so the carousel has proven to be a huge success and has certainly spurred development in that part of our downtown. but things were happening slowly and incrementally. And we felt collectively as a community like We don't want to wait another 30 years for this to continue to marinate. Like we need to spur something a little quicker. And so, you know, the short term goal was yes, just come back and create a plan. Excuse me. The long term goal is we really want our downtown thriving. Like many communities, I mean, certainly in the in the Rust Belt part of the country, you know, we have struggled with a a declining population. Which impacts our businesses' abilities to find employees, it impacts our tax base. you know, that that's a big problem. And what we've seen, you know, we've watched communities all over the country do this. When you strengthen the heart of your community, the kind of that core, the growth emanates out from that. And so that's really that was our overall goal was let's strengthen the core and then you know, kind of. have that spur and spoke out into the farther areas.
12:00.076 Brandon Burton
Yeah, so you had mentioned the bumper stickers. Yeah. so this carousel, was it city owned? Was it privately owned? Is that what spurred the bumper sticker and kind of the the pushback against the carousel?
12:17.966 Jodie Perry
Sure. So this was in the early 90s. And you know, I think at the time there was, I can tell you, you know, downtown Mansfield at that time was was not a place that many people wanted to go. and so there was definitely just some skepticism as part of it. the place where the carousel was going, the city did use eminent domain to capture some of that land, so that certainly spurred some of it. It's not city owned the carousel. It is its own nonprofit, but the city was actively involved along with some private developers in in doing it. and interestingly, kind of a byproduct was, you know, at the time, it's a wooden carousel, so it's all hand-carved animals. And at the time there wasn't anyone doing that anymore. So a company was created to build this carousel locally, and they still are here. They're called carousel works, and they're the only wooden manufacturer of carousels. So they now ship them, build them here in in Mansfield and and ship them all over the world. so it kind of has a an economic development tie into it, which I think is is really awesome.
13:27.758 Brandon Burton
That is awesome. That is cool. So going from those bumper stickers and that resistance in the community, how did you go about building the social capital to have this kind of rising of downtown and and changing this whole outlook for the future?
13:44.504 Jodie Perry
Yeah, so when I said earlier, you know, our our low was was pretty low here. And so I think what that did do, the positive of that, was that it brought everyone around the table to say, look, how we've been doing things isn't working. We need to do it differently. And so, you know, there was a lot of entities and organizations that have really built up this idea of collaboration. I don't think we could have done this project. Two years earlier or three years earlier. I mean, the timing of it was definitely providential. certainly I would say, you know, in my work as the chamber exec, I spent, so this was about what, two and a half years, almost three years into my term when we first started talking about this. I had spent an awful lot of time building relationships and doing smaller collaborations with these entities that were our key partners. And so I think that that allowed us to build trust. And we knew how each other worked and we knew that, you know, yeah, if we're all gonna do this together, we're all gonna deliver together. So I think that would that really mattered. The other thing I would say is that we were extremely intentional about who we recruited on the team. so there was 15 of us that went and like I said, some of us would be the usual suspects. And then there were some that were not the usual suspects. we were purposefully we kind of chose a younger demographic, a more diverse demographic. we wanted folks that were either living, working, or already investing in some way in downtown Mansfield and and had some evidence that they were people that could deliver. you know. We knew it would be a lot of work. I I have to be honest, I had no idea how much work it was gonna be. both in the planning and and certainly now now we're implementing the plan. but you know, I think we we had a really great team and and that really turned out to matter extensively throughout this process.
15:54.08 Brandon Burton
So with this trip to South by Southwest, were these ideas and things that you got to implement into into this goal, were they specifically from South by Southwest or from the city of Austin or a combination? What what spurred these ideas that you had to implement into Mansfield?
16:12.684 Jodie Perry
Yeah, so the plan has amazingly thirty-nine ideas, which is a an awful lot of ideas, but you know, they range from very small to to very large ideas. and I would say they came from, yeah, certainly some came from our our trip to Austin, both Austin itself as well as South by Southwest. but we also did an awful lot of excuse me. research when we came back. We did a lot of benchmarking and looking at what other communities were doing. we did a tremendous amount of listening to our own community when we got back as well. We went on a listening tour and did some fun interactive things to try to pull ideas out of our own local audience. So it's really an amalgamation of all of those things.
17:04.118 Brandon Burton
All right. So so you talked a little bit about how you went about building social capital, building those relationships and and that trust throughout some of these community leaders, if you will. And how did you go about using media to promote this project and to get the community at large on board?
17:26.356 Jodie Perry
a great question and again this is really providential about who our partners were so i mentioned jay all read earlier jay happens to be the publisher of richlandsource.com and it's a local online news media outlet and so obviously having them as as a key partner made a huge difference in this I'll remember so we kind of recruited everyone in the summer of twenty seventeen, but we didn't actually go to South by Southwest until March of twenty eighteen. And about a month out, we started meeting monthly just to, you know, we didn't all know each other. So we we did some community building and things like that to get ready for the trip. And about a month earlier, before we traveled, Jay reached out to myself and and Allie Watson, who was our other partner from the Richmond County Foundation. And he said, Hey, I think we need to take advantage of this opportunity. Only 15 of us can travel, but I think other people will be interested in our experience. Why don't we have the team blog? And I I was I was very reticent about that because I was like, what if someone goes off the reservation? What happens if they say something crazy? And so, but luckily he he talked us off the ledge and he was like, No, I think this will be great. My team will help with editing it, it'll be fine. So we had an extensive blog. blog schedule. We all blogged at least twice or three times on the trip. And that ended up being incredible. we had huge amounts of reads on those blogs. And so, you know, we're down there kind of in a bubble. and we came back and it was really evident that a lot of the community was following what we were saying and and what we were learning, which was really awesome. And so we had a hashtag that we used. that ended up having it a million views on social media just in the the couple months around the actual trip itself, which was just like, I mean, as a chamber person, I I love what I do, but there's very little that we do that impacts the general public so pervasively. And so this was a whole new experience for me. So we kept and stayed committed to that throughout the process. We stayed pretty transparent, continued to blog, continued to
19:51.592 Jodie Perry
I I mentioned on listening to her, we we really went out of our way to engage the public. And I think that that really it mattered in the end. you know, Mansfield Rising has become its own entity. I mean, not literally organizationally, but just like it's its own thing in our community now. And I think that, you know, that partnership with the with the media is really to to a large degree responsible for that.
20:20.226 Brandon Burton
So I'm curious, what was the hashtag that you guys r used?
20:24.046 Jodie Perry
So at the time we used South by Southwest419, which is our area code. So it's SXSW419. and if you search that, you'll see on Twitter and Facebook and everything links to our blogs. And you know, we certainly were active on social media while we were there. and that's really the hashtag we use throughout the whole planning process. When we got to the end of the plan and delivered it, which was about a year ago, we all said, you know. At this point, South by Southwest was our our vehicle to get here, but it really meaningful Yeah, it's not meaningful anymore to what we're doing. So so that was when we transitioned to the name Mansfield Rising.
21:06.26 Brandon Burton
Okay. So I'm gonna put these hashtags in the show notes too. So if people wanna check out what these posts look like on Twitter and Facebook and everything to see what that discussion looked like, they can kind of check that out and see some of those blog posts and everything. I love that you're able to partner with the online newspaper and i it wasn't just social media. I'm sure I mean social media leveraged what you had going on with the blog and all that. but I think that becomes an outlet that a lot of people maybe overlook and they don't think about the the local stuff. They just go straight to social media and it it can work in tandem very well. so where are you guys at now in the implementation of your plan for Mansfield Rising?
21:54.318 Jodie Perry
So we delivered the report a year ago. It was accepted by the foundation. and then we went on, we spent about three months shoring up additional support. So obviously the chamber board passed it. we went to city council, they adopted it, our county commissioners adopted it. I think right now we're up to like over a dozen organizations that have kind of, you know, given their seal of approval to it. and then we transitioned really into working projects and and plans. So again, you know, the team we continue to meet every month and and we're working on different projects. We've had some wins you know some things that were already kind of in process before we went even traveled but sounds like a relatively small thing but in our community it was big we had So we have a lot of one-way streets in our downtown, which makes it very hard to get around and not not very friendly to a visitor. So we worked with the city, the chamber and the city partnered together to flip one of them into a two-way street. and it was that's huge. It it is, and it was it was an amazing amount of work, which I had no idea of when I happened to call the city engineer and ask him. He was one of our our team members, which certainly helped, but ton of work. that took place in August. And, you know, at the time when it was announced by the city and voted on and everything, you know, there's social media outcry, my gosh, the sky's gonna fall. And I'm telling you, like not a single thing has happened. Like everyone just is driving on it like, gee, this makes sense. Like, right, exactly. So We're already talking about a couple other streets. we did do a a temporary, you call them a like a pop-up project in our downtown to look at increasing accessibility. We kind of have a a couple long city blocks. So we temporarily put in a a mid block crosswalk. that was so successful that we went ahead and and made that permanent and put a decorative thing in. So, so that's been another tangible thing.
24:12.358 Jodie Perry
So right now we're also in the planning stages. one of the projects in the plan is investing in Main Street. So our our Main Street streetscape is about 40 years old, it's crumbling, it's not the best look for the front door of the community. And so we are putting together about an eight a seven million dollar project to fix that. And you know, two years ago. I don't even think pe you know, I mean, people would be like, yeah, that's that's needed, but how are we gonna do that? How do we pay for that? but there's there's avenues to pay for it and we're we're moving down the pike. So it's it's not a done deal yet, but I think within the next few months it it will be. so that's huge. I mean, that's gonna just totally transform our downtown. So we're really excited about a lot of these things that are going on. The other big thing that we're working on, particularly Is a community brand. And so that was one of the recommendations in the plan. So the chamber and our visitors bureau are partnering on this project, again in a collaborative, inclusive manner. we've hired a branding company. we have shored up all of our funding to pay them, which was a a challenge. And yeah, and so we're gonna kick that off after the first of the year and and hopefully by the end of the year we'll have a a new brand.
25:42.76 Brandon Burton
Awesome. So as you're giving that that answer there, it made me wonder, you know, with all this attention to downtown, do you have I'm sure you've got a a healthy amount of chamber members and businesses in the community that are outside of downtown. Do they have any pushback to so much attention being put on downtown? Or how do you go about, you know, explaining the importance of revitalizing downtown to the overall community?
26:12.91 Jodie Perry
Excuse me. I wouldn't say that we've had pushback. certainly I've had members that say, hey Jody, don't forget there's other areas of the community. you know, to address that and and actually to even compound that, we represent the whole county. So there's two other cities and multiple other villages that we work with on a regular basis. So from our perspective as the chamber, we've really tried to be very intentional about working projects. in each of these areas. So they may not all be as large as Mansfield Rising, but there are certainly projects that are meaningful
27:00.237 Brandon Burton
Yeah.
27:01.24 Jodie Perry
Okay, sorry, I'm I was having that phone call call in. but there are certainly projects that are me are meaningful. I would say, you know, for another exec that that might be considering doing something, you know, be strategic so that you can you know, really try to show that you are focusing some attention on other areas. I mean, you you can't give everything to everywhere. there certainly is a limit. But I think there's a lot to To the argument that if you can bolster the core of your community, the overall community is and will be more successful.
27:40.248 Brandon Burton
Very good. I I agree. you gotta give the attention all around, but having a certain focus I think helps and as you can draw more, whether it's tourism or whether it's just overall business growth and just strength, even if it's a focus in Mansfield, it's gonna filter out as people live in the surrounding communities and everything. So it is important. But what metrics can you see to show what effectiveness or success you guys are having in implementing your Mansfield Rising project.
28:14.658 Jodie Perry
Yeah, great question. So we're early in the process in terms of implementation. so a lot of, you know, we have great metrics as far as the interaction that we've had from the general public. so you know, I mentioned that the hashtag metric earlier. you know, because of Richland Source, they they've been able to track the readership on their stories. you know, a big metric, was that our city council, which you know, I mentioned earlier, they had been in fiscal emergency not too long before this. they actually have created a fund to support projects in the downtown area. And that is just huge. you know, to be able to have s some money from the municipal government has has definitely been a game changer. otherwise they'd be great ideas and and not a lot of ways to get to them. certainly the the Richland County Foundation and the philanthropic money that is you know, committed is also a game changer in their focus being downtown. and, you know, I would say just anecdotally, and I wish there was a way to track it, there's just more optimism here. you know, there are still those that are are skeptical and and probably have that bumper sticker. But you know, I think what it has unleashed is people that have said, my gosh, I've wanted positive things to happen for so long. It's so awesome to see you guys out in front of this and really trying to move things. So, you know, it's hard to measure that. But you know, we just went through an election cycle where we had competitive races in every city election. And that's been a long time since that's happened. And I think that's because people see hope. They see that there are things changing and and there's a lot of reasons. That's I'm not I by no means am I saying Nancy old rising is the only reason for that. but I think it's a tangible thing that people do seem to have attached themselves to, which is again, it's really fun for me because as a chamber exec, I love my job. I love what we do, but so much of it I'm not
30:35.83 Jodie Perry
i you know, I mean, I interact with the general public, but I'm not affecting the general public in this way. So this was has truly been a a a a fun project to work on.
30:45.964 Brandon Burton
Yeah, I'm sure all that credit is directly because of you and because of Mansfield Rising.
30:51.214 Jodie Perry
We'll we'll take it, but no. There's lots of good stuff happening.
30:57.58 Brandon Burton
I I think, you know, we'd love to have the data and everything to point back to, but I I think what you said is so key. Just hearing people be more optimistic and getting that positive feedback and because that's gonna change the whole environment of the community. If the optimism's there and people are willing to put themselves out there and do more because they feel like the community at large is is more positive and and a brighter outlook. is gonna just have a positive influence over the the entire community. So I think that it's not a exact data point that you can look at, but optimism is huge. So
31:33.55 Jodie Perry
Yeah, it's like momentum in sports, right? The team that has that momentum. It there's i I don't know how you measure that, but it certainly makes a difference. And I think it does to a community too. So I feel like we're we're getting that finally, which is fun.
31:46.708 Brandon Burton
Exactly. So and Jody, as we start wrapping things up here, regarding our discussion today around community development projects, for the chamber professionals that are listening, based on our discussion today, what action items could you share with them as they try to lift their communities and their chambers up to the next level?
32:11.374 Jodie Perry
You know, I would say a couple of things. First, don't be afraid to convene. you know, we sit in a really unique position as the Chamber of Commerce. We have a pretty big tent. So we have small business, large business, government, private sector, philanthropy, education, et cetera, et cetera. And so we have an opportunity to convene. And I think that, you know, if I see a trend in the industry, I I've been in the industry 17 years, it's that we as chambers are starting to embrace that role. And so it might be convening on a small topic to begin, but that can grow into something larger. And the second thing I would say is that collaboration really is key. And that's going to take a real commitment to relationship building and trust building. And I think you know it's hard work. It's hard to maintain it. It is a tremendous time commitment on my part to be building these relationships. But I a hundred percent believe that this project couldn't have happened if we weren't doing that. So you know, just think about as you're going through your day, you know, if you're struggling with an area, I mean, not necessarily a physical area of your community, but just a topic or something. Well, who do you need to build that relation build a relationship with to start conversations? Because I'm constantly amazed in this industry, in this job, how often things happen just based off of a conversation where you're just like, you think that too? Yeah, me too. We should do something about that. And sometimes we just get so busy with the day to day that we forget to have those conversations. So
34:00.46 Brandon Burton
I love it. Convene and collaborate. So I I asked this question to everyone that I have on the podcast that as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the purpose of a chamber going forward?
34:16.994 Jodie Perry
You know, kind of how I answered that last question. The the chamber has a a really unique role in a community. And yes, we represent the business community and that that is certainly our core product, but we also have a a bigger, I believe we have a a bigger role in terms of community development. And so again, you know, in my seventeen years in the industry, which by the way makes me feel really old, but You know, there's a definite change happening within our profession. And so we're at the beginning it was very focused on the things that just serve the business needs. I think now we realize, well, as the business community goes, so goes the general community and vice versa. And so we have to be we can't be too narrowly focused. We we have to be bridge builders. And so that that's my That's where I see things going. And I I you know, attending ACCE and Institute, I'm I'm constantly really trying to challenge and grow myself in terms of, you know, some of these things I've I've never done before. So how do I do it and who can I connect with that can help me become a better exec?
35:36.462 Brandon Burton
That's great. So if any listeners out there wanted to kind of pick your brain a little bit or ask you some questions about how you went about this Mansfield Rising community development project that maybe we didn't cover, what would be the best way they could reach out to you and connect with you?
35:54.638 Jodie Perry
Sure. So my email is email's a great way. it's Jperry at Richlandarea Chamber dot com. you can also catch me at the chamber, which is four one nine five two two three two one one. I did I'm also I have a Twitter handle which is at Chamber Doty. So I'm I'm not always the most dedicated to that, but certainly you can you can look at that. Right. J-O-D-I-E, yes, thank you. I will say I did present about Lansfield Rising at the ACCE conference in 20 this year in 2019. I'd be happy to share my presentation with anyone that that's interested in learning more and and certainly talking about it. It's a unique project, and you know, not that I think every chamber's gonna do it. Maybe nobody else does it, but I think it kind of presented a different way to look at community planning. And there's certainly aspects of it that any size community could do.
36:57.346 Brandon Burton
That's right. And we'll get all that all your contact information on our show notes page for this episode, which will be found at chamber chatpodcast dot com slash episode fifty three. And if you'd like, we can actually link directly to your ACCE presentation. So if people want to just go there, they can link directly to it and see what all you had to say about Mansfield Rising.
37:18.51 Jodie Perry
Sure, that'd be awesome.
37:20.098 Brandon Burton
Very good. Well, I appreciate you spending some time with us today, Jody, here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I think you bring some insight and perspective from, you know, your point of view there in in Mansfield, Ohio. And hopefully some some of those that are listening can get some ideas of how they can work on some community development projects in their own communities. So thanks a lot.
37:42.84 Jodie Perry
Thanks, Brandon.
37:44.896 Brandon Burton
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This transcript has been lightly edited for readability and to correct obvious transcription errors while preserving the meaning of the original conversation.

Episode 52 — Leadership Visits with Matt McCormick
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Matt McCormick
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.83 Brandon Burton
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.
00:14.862 Brandon Burton
Are you?
00:19.736 Brandon Burton
Brent. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. This is Brandon Burton, your host, and it's my goal to help introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. This is episode 52 of Chamber Chat Podcast, which means we're right around the one year mark, which is pretty exciting. But our guest today is Matt McCormick, who's the president and CEO of. Of the Columbia Chamber of Commerce located in Columbia, Missouri. Matt has over 20 years of tenure in the chamber industry, and he brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to organizations and individuals utilizing his professional expertise to strengthen business entrepreneurs and executives seeking success. Having held positions ranging from membership director to president, Matt has a keen understanding of what is required to build and sustain a successful team. A graduate of Stephen F. Austin University with a degree in speech communications, Matt went on to graduate from the Institute of Organizational Management as well as receive his certified chamber executive. Active in his local community and chamber industry, Matt is the past chairman of the Texas Chamber of Commerce Executives Board of Directors, Board of Directors for MACO, and is the past chairman of for the Board of Regents. For the Winter Institute Organizational Management for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He also serves as Vice Chair of the U.S. Chamber Institute for Organizational Management Board of Trustees, Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives Board of Directors, and is a chair-elect for the Certified Chamber Executives Program. It's quite a resume. Matt's here to talk with us today about the importance of leadership visits and things, lessons that he's learned. By both going on leadership visits and hosting them in his community. And we'll jump right into this discussion as soon as we get back from hearing from our sponsor. Every chamber is looking for new ways to increase their non-dues revenue. Has your chamber found a good affinity program? I have a great affinity program to offer your chamber that will continue to increase in revenue year after year. I want to introduce you to Swipe It.
02:39.0 Brandon Burton
For all of your credit card processing needs. Swipe It has a unique affinity program that 1. Lowers your credit card processing fees at the chamber, 2. helps your chamber members be more profitable, and 3. provides recurring non-dues revenue to your chamber. To learn more, please visit ChamberTapPodcast.com/slash CC for credit card. Again, Chamberchat Podcast dot com slash C C and get swiping with swipe it. All right, Matt, we are back. Thank you for joining us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I'm happy to have you here with us, but please take a moment to say hello to the audience and if you would share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know Matt McCormick a little bit better.
03:29.648 Matt McCormick
thank you, Everyone. I appreciate the opportunity to spend some time with you and and get to talk some. It's always it's always wonderful to have the chance to talk about our industry and things that are going on in our organizations. something interesting got me that I guess there's probably not a lot outside of you know, most of my time's taken up between my job with the chambers and working with our businesses and I've got two young kids and so that's you know, I've got a fourteen year old and a nine year old, and so we're full fledged into sports and different programs like that. So that's that's like I said, not overly interesting, but that's what pretty much takes up my my world.
04:08.622 Brandon Burton
Yeah so your Saturdays must be wide open these days, right? yeah.
04:11.928 Matt McCormick
Saturdays are always white open. I don't think I've had a Saturday in about fourteen years.
04:19.426 Brandon Burton
I hear ya. I'm in that same boat with you. Same same point in life right now. So it's fun.
04:24.768 Matt McCormick
It is, it goes fast and I wouldn't trade it for the world.
04:27.806 Brandon Burton
That's right.
04:29.686 Matt McCormick
Well Friday worth it all so Owen trade it for the world.
04:34.39 Brandon Burton
That's right. Well, why don't you take a moment and just share with us a little bit about the Columbia Chamber of Commerce so we can all understand a little bit better from your perspective about the size and location, budget, things like that, so we can know where you're coming from as you're talking about leadership visits today.
04:49.506 Matt McCormick
Yeah, so I'll I'll share a little bit about our community and and the chamber both. So Columbia is located right in the heart of Missouri. we're about halfway between St. Louis and Kansas City. we're the home of the University of Missouri, and we're also the home our number one economic driver here is education. So not only are we the home of University of Missouri, we're also the home of a couple other colleges, Stevens College, which is a women's college, and then Columbia College. and then we have a number of other community college and a number of other satellites. our other economic drivers here, just so people kind of have an understanding is also healthcare and insurance. So we're the national headquarters for a couple of different insurance companies that you'll see nationwide and such. So it's a great community with about 120, 130,000 population when the students aren't here and then you can add about another 20 to 30,000 to that whenever all of our students are back in town. So it's a fun place to be. the chamber itself, we have right at about a thousand members. we have a staff of ten. we run our budgets, about a one and a half million dollar budget. and we have you know, kind of some different things that we have for chambers our size. but in our state it works great and and is needed in in the directions that we're going. so we have a full-time government affairs person that is our lobbyist for the organization and we work heavily in legislative affairs on both a local and a state level. and then we have four divisions within the organization. One is our women's network, which is about 500 members strong. and we've got a director that focuses strictly on women's network. We have our EPIC program, which is Emerging Professionals in Columbia. It's our YP program, if you will. And then our other our other two are our ambassadors program, much like everybody else has. and then we have a partnership that is a division of the chamber called Columbia Community Partnership that's kind of a lobbying group, but what's unique about it is it is a convenient we brought together a group of us our city, our county, our school district, our convention and visitors bureau, our university and our community college, and we work on legislative issues that impact our our community as a whole and not just specifically one or the other. so we're very busy and growing and yeah it's a great place to be.
07:07.36 Brandon Burton
It sounds like it. Sounds like you've got a lot going on there at your chamber and and really for a chamber the size of yours, I mean that you guys really are taking on a lot. So that's pretty impressive. so our as I alluded to earlier, our discussion topic for today is gonna be centered around leadership visits. Yeah. And a few episodes back we had Bob Quick on and and we talked a little bit about chamber travel and it it talked a little bit about leadership visits, but from your perspective, what why are leadership visits so important and what are some lessons that you've learned both from going on leadership visits and hosting leadership visits yourself?
07:51.66 Matt McCormick
You Bob Quick, he's he's one of my heroes. I love him to death. And I've become quite passionate about leadership business because of Bob. You know, whenever we start taking a look, I've been here for almost seven years, and one of the first things we start taking a look at is is this something that we can implement in the Columbia Chamber of Commerce? And what does that mean? And so we took a fact-finding trip to Lexington to visit with Bob and his team there. And I tell you, he he was the most gracious host in the world and opened up everything to us, and we got to spend two days with his. team there just learning about leadership visits, how to do it, what to do. I mean they're the they're the they're the grandfather of this or of this program out there in our industry and he has led that charge and because of him and and his abilities and his willingness to share with us is why it's become successful for us and why we're so passionate about it. You know, it's one of those programs, it's a nondues revenue item for us and we do, we do make revenue off of it, which is great. But you know one of the biggest things that we found out of it quickly and Bob told us that we would, but you don't realize it till you do it, was the relationship building that that you do. You you learn so much about different programs. You know, we've gone to we're coming up on our seventh one. We're about to announce in January to our membership where we'll be going. we've gone things we've gone to Lexington. we did take a trip to Lexington. last year we went to Tuscaloosa, which was one of the most gracious hosts in the world. and they're doing some wonderful things there. we've been to Fort Collins, Colorado, Gainesville, Florida, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Knoxville, Tennessee. One of the things that we try to do is make sure that it's always a university town because there's just something unique about a university town. but but the relationships that have been built within our people that go, we cap ours at 70 individuals, because that gives us a manageable group that we can move around and experience the community. and some of the you know, some of the the most fun thing to see is whenever you have people that might be two two total opposite people maybe politically, or maybe there are people within the community that would never really have any reason to run into each other, build a relationship that h moves things forward and a relationship that helps each other out and and it becomes a win win. and so it's that's that's to me been one of the most
10:12.858 Matt McCormick
rewarding parts out of it is how it's convened a lot of our different people and organizations in our community. We have for-profit businesses, so we have our business community go and CEOs go, we have our nonprofit community go on the trip. we also have elected officials with our school district and our city and our county and our state. We have higher education. I think just about every single higher education institution we have here has somebody on the trip. And we've seen some amazing things come out of the partnerships that you see there.
10:46.114 Brandon Burton
So as you were talking about the relationships that get developed, it made me wonder, do you ever try to play like a matchmaker and think here's a couple of people I wanna get together and and help build a strong relationship? Or do you just let it go naturally and just let these people kind of gravitate gravitate towards each other?
11:01.344 Matt McCormick
You know, it's a little bit of both actually. And I feel you know, sometimes you feel like that old I forget the old dating games show that used to be on you know, back in the eighties and early nineties. but sometimes you do feel that way. But sometimes it is natural. You just you what you see is you see people kinda come out of their shell and you see those that are they're gonna make sure that they work the room and meet people they don't know. And then many times we'll have people say, Hey, I need to I need to meet so and so. Can you help me enter d who's here from this industry? Can you help introduce me to this person? And by all means we always do that too. We will we'll always help set those up and get those people together and do whatever we can to make those connections. And so it's a looks of both. Yeah. It's a lot of fun.
11:43.576 Brandon Burton
So with you you said you cap it at seventy people on these leadership visits. just logistically, what does that look like as far as the travel goes? How do you go about it? Just to maybe spur some ideas for other chambers that are listening.
11:56.142 Matt McCormick
Yeah, so where we're located, one of the challenges that we ran into quickly, and our vice president Jo Lynn Sadizan, she takes care of this for us and she oversees this program and and is a whiz with it. She is w she's she's fantastic and she can answer any question in the world about it. But one of the things that we realized quickly on was the travel. We were when we first started this we were having to take groups to you know, two hours out to St. Louis or to Kansas City and try to charter it try to work commercial airlines that way. We have a great airport here, but the flights the planes at the at that time weren't big enough to they would the airlines wouldn't allow us it to set up that many seats. So as it's grown, what we ended up doing actually is three years ago we actually chartered a plane. so we charter a 737 that flies out of flies into Columbia here and picks us up and that's one of the reasons that we cap it at 70 because of the way that that flight is set. And what that also helps us do is when we're going into these other communities of about our size most of the facilities they have, 70 is a good manageable group because we like to move our we like to move our group around the community so they can experience the community and not just be in a hotel ballroom here. and that way they can also experience the community. And so 70 has tended to be a good group for us for that flight and then also for moving people around in the community via buses and then also rooms and and that just physical space to move that around. Seventy also has what we have found kind of what's worked for our community is seventy is a good size group, but it's not so big that people don't get to meet everybody else on the on the trip. and so it works for our community well.
13:37.336 Brandon Burton
it seems like a good number to be able to not be overwhelmed completely, but to be able to make the build those relationships and meet people that you wouldn't normally meet. So for all those reasons you just listed seventy seems like that magical number, at least for in your community.
13:51.864 Matt McCormick
Yeah, it works for our community. And I think that's the key to it is is, you know, if it's something that you're looking at starting up and such, it's one of those things you're gonna have to kind of test some markets, test some things and see what can your community what what can your market bear, but what also works for your community and for your region that you serve. And I said seventy tends to work well for us.
14:11.342 Brandon Burton
So talk to us a little bit about when you've hosted leadership visits. have you reached out to Chambers? Have they reached out to you? what have you learned from that experience?
14:22.136 Matt McCormick
A little bit of both and you know, going on a going on a visit and hosting a visit are two totally different worlds and we absolutely love hosting other communities here. and one of the things that it's really helped us out with is we kind of we kind of re refused is a strong word, but we we opted out of hosting some until we started taking and had a couple of trips under our belt so we could see what it takes to actually put one of these on. And what's great about that is whenever we've been able to host communities now. our last one that we hosted earlier this calendar year was Athens, Georgia. and whenever we've been able to host communities, it's given us a good insight on what it takes to host. And it's really great to see because the com the community people that go on these trips for us, they become quite the host on our end also. So we reach out to our city and we reach out to our business community that's experienced the trip from our side and say, hey, we have a group coming in, in this case, you know, from Athens, and they had this many people and they're wanting to discuss this. would you mind serving on a panel or do you have a facility and things like that. And they're also they they always open their arms for whatever needs to be done because they've had the experience on the other side. and so it's always kind of fun to also show off your community and what it does well and have those good open conversations. And that's the key to it also is being willing. When you host you gotta be willing to talk about the good, the bad and the ugly. And because that's what they're looking for as well. And that's how everybody grows. We all grow together on it. And so It's it's I enjoy hosting as much as I enjoy going.
15:53.07 Brandon Burton
So I think that's an important point you made when you host that it you gotta cover the good, bad and ugly and everybody likes talking about the good. Yeah.
16:04.878 Matt McCormick
with everything that's great. It's hard to talk about the struggles and the challenges.
16:10.292 Brandon Burton
And to to willingly put yourself out there to be open and say, here's the bad and the ugly. This is what we've gone through and what we've learned. But that is so valuable for the people that you're hosting and and to be able to kind of push the ball further down the field, so to say. so as a nondues revenue source for you with these leadership visits, how is that structured? How does that work in your chamber? as a a nondu's revenue source.
16:41.41 Matt McCormick
Yeah, so you know, we take a look at a lot of what we do for when we're looking at non-dues revenue programming, what I really try to take a look is for that that sweet spot, those things that are mission and initiative driven, but that we can also make money at to continue expanding and growing the organization. you know, I'm not for me, I'm not big into doing a fundraiser just to do a fundraiser, but if we can implement a program like a leadership visit that helps us meet our mission. helps us work on initiatives that we're working on as an organization and initiatives that we're working on as a community. And we can make some revenue off of it so we can continue to grow our organization. That's the important part. that's that's where for me it's a win-win and we call the sweet spot. You know, and we've ranged anywhere from and it kind of depends, we range anywhere from you know, ten, fifteen thousand dollars to you know, thirty thousand dollars. It all kind of depends on what does those expenses look like and what do we think we can keep it in. When we first approached this with our board of directors, we went to them with this plan and this idea and asked for a three year a grace period to do three of these trips with the understanding our goal would be to break even. it wasn't meant straight off the bat to do a to be a moneymaker. we believed that it would get there, but we asked for three years to get it there. and honestly, we were it it hit the ground running. quicker than we realize and became more popular than we realized from from trip one, we made you know at least a little bit of some sort of revenue on it. And it's continued to grow from there. And you and the the biggest challenge is sometimes you know figuring out what that revenue is going to be because you know every town's different and you know renting buses in this community versus renting buses in that community are different and hotels and what the what the host community is willing to help you out with if they can. or at least help you make the connections that you can work with them. So I said, you know, Tuscaloosa rolled rolled out the we went there this fall and they rolled out the red carpet for us and I would recommend to anybody to check out what they've got going on in Tuscaloosa. but as is every community we've gone to.
18:52.878 Brandon Burton
So as you first started rolling out the idea of doing these leadership visits, how did you you had mentioned how you presented to the board about trying to just break even and have that grace period for the first three years? But as far as getting others on board to come along with this leadership visit, you'd mentioned the for-profit businesses and nonprofits and the educational, having all these different representatives of your community go. How did you go about getting them on board and getting them excited about, you know, stepping away from the office for a few days and and checking out this this new thing that you're presenting to
19:27.596 Matt McCormick
Yeah, you know, whenever you're asking a CEO of a major corporation to step out of office for three days, you better make it worth your while. as you'd anybody, whether it's a major corporation or small business or everything in between, you you better make it worth their while. And so what we first started off with is what would our agenda take a look at? You know, what are the topics that we would be looking at and also looking for input. So we looked at everything from, you know, healthcare to workforce to, you know, public safety, transportation infrastructure. And then we then our next step was we took a basically made a target list of what are the companies, what are the people that we need to have on this trip and to buy in. And we sat down and we went and one on one and also on the financial side, who do we need to target for sponsorships for this? and so we we made a target list and went and sat down with each one of those each one of those people and asked them to make an investment with us to help us out and be on the first to set this in motion. And you know, we had some no's and that was fantastic. And you know, some of those no's have eventually kind of looped back around to where they're going on the trip now because they see the they see the the benefits off of it. And we had some folks, one of our developers in town stepped up right away. He said, you know what, he was on our board at the time, he said, you know what, I believe in this. I think this is the right thing that we should be doing. and he became our title sponsor. and then whenever he became, you know, you got a couple other couple those names on there. Others were like, well, so and so is involved in with this. I need to be involved with this. And so it really started snowballing from there, but we made that target list of who we needed to go sit down and talk with and who we needed to work with and get them on board. we relied on a number of our board members as well to have those conversations to help us have those conversations and open doors where we might not be able to open doors. and that's how we approached it. And so it's taken off from there. We do a total resource campaign here for the chamber. that many chambers do. And so this is one of the th one of those things that has become successful enough that it sells out pretty fast through our total resource campaign for the sponsorships.
21:31.426 Brandon Burton
So I was gonna ask about that. From the seventy that it's capped at each year, what percentage of those seventy attendees are are going the next time? Is it usually the same people or does it turn over?
21:40.066 Matt McCormick
You know.
21:43.968 Matt McCormick
It ebbs and flows. We'll usually have somewhere between thirty to fifty percent of a turnover. So which is nice because you have some continuity. we've got a group of about five or six people that call themselves the six time club. They've gone to all six all six of our trips. but then it's also nice to get some new people on the trip and get them excited about the program. So it kind of depends the you know, the challenge you're always gonna have with this is what time of year to do it, when best fits schedules. There's n you know, there's never a good time, right? we try to do the fall works works for us and in between but you know, then you're juggling college football games on both here and then also your host city. And so talking with you know and working with them and just what what tends to work or what works in people's budgets. So we have probably a thirty to fifty percent turnover rate. this year it was we had probably about fifty percent new people because it just fell conflict with some others. and so but it was great 'cause we got some We got some people that we haven't been able to get before and they were willing to take they're willing to go on the trip and now we have some some new fans about the chamber and some new fans about this program.
22:54.808 Brandon Burton
So do you happen to give first priority to the people that were on the previous trip to go on the next one? Or is it just open as part of the total resource campaign, kind of first come, first serve those first seventy?
23:05.656 Matt McCormick
So whenever it's just as far as just the registrations, what we do is we reach out to all those in the past that have gone and we send out you know a week before I think it's about a week before it opens up to everyone, a pre-registration, early registration abilities so that they can get on board on the trip. And then a week later, then it opens up to our our entire membership and community. When it comes to the sponsorships, our sponsorships, the way we work our total resource campaign with the sponsorships.
23:29.248 Brandon Burton
Okay.
23:35.518 Matt McCormick
is first writer refusal for our sponsors. I will say most of our sponsors we started off with day one we still have today. and a lot of those with their sponsorships have a spot on the trip. and they've you know they've really bought in and understand the benefit that this has brought along. And and then other sponsorships have sold sold throughout the year as the as the programs continue to grow.
24:03.412 Brandon Burton
Okay. So I'm curious as you get back from these leadership visits, what kind of follow-up is there? Do you convene the the seventy attendees and talk about what you've learned or is that all done while you're on the trip or what what kind of follow up is there from the visit?
24:18.936 Matt McCormick
So we do a little bit of both. So what we do is the last day on the trip before we all start heading back home is we do kind of a wrap-up. What have you learned? What are you going to take back to the community? You know, one of the things that we we work with our group on is, you know, the ideas that come out of this don't need to just be Chamber of Commerce ideas of new programs the chamber is going to take take part of. What ideas are you as an attendee going to take back to your community, take back to your organization? And say, you what, I learned this whenever I was in in on this leadership visit. And I think we need to start doing that. And we've seen that come out with especially a lot in our education partnerships. And so and then whenever we get back, we usually convene everybody together, we do a wrap-up, both with everybody, and then also we do a written wrap-up that puts out, you know, here are the topics that we learned about, here's the feedback that we got. You know, this year one of the one of the big things that came back this year is workforce development. That is something that the chamber's taken on. But we had some other good things that have come out that our attendees have taken on in their own organizations.
25:27.835 Brandon Burton
I love that. The fact that whatever you know you take the takeaways from the leadership trip do not have to be chamber based. And I think that's so vital for everybody that that attends the t the leadership trip to be able to take what they can and apply back to their business or the universities or whatever segment of the community that they are very active in and just improve the community. That that's awesome.
25:51.126 Matt McCormick
It's a community program. It's not just a chamber program. It's not to find out what else the chamber needs to be doing. Sometimes that comes out of it, but it's what can we be doing as a community, as a region to be better. and to always be growing the right direction. And that's the purpose of the trip. you know, I can find more programs to do without doing a big massive trip just for the chamber. but with it goes so much further than just what we we need to be doing and goes back to one of our core missions is a convener of our business community and our community as a whole. and and through that convening is how do we move our community as a whole forward.
26:29.07 Brandon Burton
That's right. Great, great takeaway. so Matt, I wanted to ask just as as we kind of wrap things up here, what would be one action item based on our discussion today around leadership visits? What's one action item that a chamber professional can do to help take their chamber up to the next level?
26:48.514 Matt McCormick
You know, it's it to for me it's it's it's being willing to take the risk on a new program. something that takes a look at whenever you're taking a look at it and and not just not just another event, but a program that truly moves your organization and your community forward and helps the business community be successful. At the end of the day, I say this a lot, at the end of the day everything you strip down everything we do. We're here to help businesses do business. And what are those What are those programs that you're willing to take a risk on that can help your businesses do business? and programs like this that can be game changers for your for your community. Be willing to have that hard conversation with your board and work with your board and sell them on the fact. Give us a chance. I mean, even if it is asking for a three year grace period, for just to break even and you know what? even to be willing to lose money on the first year. but but understanding that this is something that we can grow into something new. So being willing to take that chance. But whenever you take that chance, you gotta go all in and you've got to do your research and you've got to be willing to show all the ins and outs that you can possibly do.
27:54.966 Brandon Burton
That's right. I love that. Be willing to take a risk on a new program. Yep. so I I'd like to ask this question to everyone that I have on the podcast. As we look to the future for chambers of commerce, how do you see the purpose of chambers going forward?
28:11.394 Matt McCormick
You know, I think a lot of that's a you know, it's something we talk about quite often and and you know, being in this industry for a little over twenty years and and now being one of the old guys in the industry, you know, you kind of see things shift from businesses joined because it's the right thing to do. you still have a little bit of that, but not quite as much. And so it's taking a look at to me, the future of the of the industry is making sure that chamber organizations are more mission and initiative driven. 'Cause what we're finding and what we're seeing in our industry is that companies are investing into initiatives more than they're investing into just because it's the right thing to do. And so for example, one of the things that we're taking on right now is is possibly building a workforce development division or department even in the chamber. And what does that take a look like look at? Look what does that look like for our community? And at some point we're gonna have to go out to our businesses and say, We needed we need your we need an investment into this initiative. And so looking into the future of the chamber where membership might even be shifting to a one of the multiple lines of revenue that you have for your organization. and not, you know, so many times we're all we're all judged on just the number of our members, but seeing that as yes, we need number of members because especially helps in legislative affairs type work and other areas. But at the same time, taking a look at what are our initiatives that we can go out to the business community and bring them in on to help fund and help to move forward. And I think that's what a lot of communities are starting to look at chambers for is being that convener and being that champion and doing those.
29:52.512 Brandon Burton
I love it. Great answer. so Matt, if for people that are listening, if they wanted to get in contact with you at all about anything you talked about or maybe planning a leadership visit to Columbia, how would they how would they get in contact with you? What's the best way to to reach out?
30:13.804 Matt McCormick
You know, the best way is i is either call or email. we got a great website also you can tap through that, which is Columbia ModeCamber dot com. make sure to have the MO part for Missouri because there's a lot of Columbias out there. And so make sure you have the Missouri part, the MO in that. And then of course our my email is just McCormick at Columbia Mow Chamber dot com or give me a call sometime at five seven three eight seven four one one three two. And love to sit down and talk about anything, even if it's just brainstorming ideas, more than happy to.
30:46.89 Brandon Burton
I love it. We'll we'll get all that updated in the show notes page for this episode, which will be found at Chamberchat Podcast.com slash episode fifty-two. But Matt, I appreciate you spending some time with us today, sharing your experiences about leadership visits. And I think you brought a lot of good insight that other chambers can use and and good takeaways that they can apply as they you know explore doing leadership visits themselves. So thank you for for spending time with us today.
31:15.288 Matt McCormick
Thank you for the opportunity. I appreciate it.
31:18.934 Brandon Burton
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This transcript has been lightly edited for readability and to correct obvious transcription errors while preserving the meaning of the original conversation.

Episode 51 — Events & Sponsorships with Rebecca Wildeboer
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Rebecca Wildeboer
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.842 Brandon Burton
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.
00:14.764 Brandon Burton
And now your host, he is proud of his Eagle Scout. He's my Brandon Burton. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. As my son Brody just mentioned there in the introduction, I am Brandon Burton. I'm your host, and I am proud of my Eagle Scout. my son Brody, he worked really hard and he's still 13 years old and just earned his Eagle Scout, which is pretty impressive for anybody who knows anything about scouting, but
00:44.28 Brandon Burton
He's a very driven young man and set some pretty ambitious goals. And my wife and I are just super thrilled that he attacked those goals and and did such a great job. So I am I am proud of my boy. But thank you for tuning in today. This is episode 51 of Chamber Chat Podcast. And our guest today is Rebecca Wildebor from the Sparta Chamber in Michigan. Rebecca, she lives in a small community just north of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her background that got her into the chamber came from when she opened a small retail business in their downtown and began to notice a lack of vibrancy and activities outside of school and church functions. She also noticed that most of her customers, primarily female, were not from the area and they were looking for places to venture. So like so many rural communities, Sparta was struggling to find revel relevancy. And Rebecca began hosting workshops, classes, and events in her business, and soon people requesting more. As the hospitality and events coordinator at the Sparta Chamber, she takes the same approach to community events as she did in her the events in her business. Rebecca believes people typically don't vacation in their backyard, and that a thriving and inviting community is one that has its own unique identity and attracts visitors who will come. spend and maybe someday live in that community. She sees sponsorship not just as a check to be written in exchange for a logo placement, but as an investment in the overall community, their business as well as their employees and their families. Today, as she is the hospitality and events coordinator, our topic of discussion today will focus around events and sponsorship, which we'll dive into as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsor. Every chamber is looking for new ways to increase their non-dues revenue. Has your chamber found a good affinity program? I have a great affinity program to offer your chamber that will continue to increase in revenue year after year. I want to introduce you to Swipe It for all of your credit card processing needs. Swipe It has a unique affinity program that 1.
03:08.354 Brandon Burton
Helps your chamber members be more profitable, and three provides recurring nondues revenue to your chamber. To learn more, please visit chamberchapodcast.com slash C C for credit card. Again, Chamberchap Podcast dot com slash C C and get swiping with swipe it. Alright, Rebecca, we are back. Thrilled to have you on the show today. Why don't you please take a moment to just say hello to the audience and if you would share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
03:45.058 Rebecca Wildeboer
Well, hi Brandon. Thank you for inviting me to be on your podcast. I also am a mother of four children, and I love that your son is taking an interest in what you're doing. I have children that have an entrepreneurial spirit, and my youngest, as a matter of fact, works here at the chamber and she started working here before I did. She's made it through high school and college. So it's fun to work with your kids.
04:14.286 Brandon Burton
That's awesome. I not many people can say that, that they work with their kid at the chamber, but that is that is pretty neat. sure it helps that relationship, hopefully, and not not stresses it.
04:27.798 Rebecca Wildeboer
I sometimes think she is my left and right arm. So I have to remind myself that when we go home she doesn't get to be all four limbs. So
04:38.754 Brandon Burton
That's right. well, can you take a moment, just share with us a little bit about the Sparta Chamber of Commerce size, location, budget, things like that, so listeners can relate a little bit better to your perspective and where you're coming from in your chamber.
04:54.606 Rebecca Wildeboer
So our current membership sits at about a hundred and seventy, and it is extremely varied. So Sparta is a bedroom community just north of Grand Rapids, and we have a mix of small mom and pop style businesses, along with strong global manufacturing and heavy agriculture. So we are situated in the heart of the apple production. Community in Michigan. So our budget, of course, varies depending on sponsorship for each year, as well as the fluctuating number of members that we have. Our events budget is actually larger than I would say our chamber budget because we focus so heavily on trying to draw traffic into the community. for those people to make a spend at our businesses.
05:58.59 Brandon Burton
All right. So I'm curious as I went through your bio, what was your what was your business downtown that you had before becoming part of the chamber there?
06:09.432 Rebecca Wildeboer
Sure. So we my friend and I opened a small coffee shop and it was attached to a building that was functioning as a consignment shop. And we were open maybe three weeks when the consignment shop owner decided they wanted out and out in a hurry, and my partner's husband passed away. So we were sitting in this very little coffee shop that had been fully dependent on the consignment shop for business. And we were in a lease and we looked at each other and said, we have no idea what to do. And at that time, I had been selling on eBay for quite some time. And I said, Well, you know, we have the space. I'm just going to bring my inventory from home here and we're going to build on it. Now my background was actually in decorative painting. I did that for about mm twenty years at that time. So I was pretty confident that that I could refinish furniture and resell it. So that's what I started to do was vintage and antiques home goods and then I did custom furniture while we had the coffee shop.
07:26.816 Brandon Burton
Wow. So just a little bit of several things. Yeah.
07:30.034 Rebecca Wildeboer
Very very typical for a small, you know, town business. You do whatever you need to do to get people in your door and to keep the doors open. So that's how we functioned.
07:39.414 Brandon Burton
That's right. Very good. So as we move on to the the topic for our discussion today around events and sponsorships. Okay. Why why is this topic so important to you?
07:53.614 Rebecca Wildeboer
Well, because I was running that business, I noticed a lack of traffic, foot traffic and vibrancy in my community. And I felt that there were things that could have been done I don't like to use the word better, but different. And I started to recognize through networking opportunities with other like business owners that they were running into a little bit of the same problem if they were in a rural area and what they were doing to get people to come stay and make a spend was they were running indoor or excuse me in-store events and they were very, very focused. They weren't just random sale events. They were extremely specific. So I started reading and doing research about boutique events and what I soon discovered was that they are a huge draw. You're speaking to one particular group of people who has an interest in X. And once you are able to build a following of people who are interested in whatever that you know that hobby or interest is, they tend to be repeat either class takers, event attendees, whatever that looks like. And it was just a natural progression for me to take what I learned running my business and getting people to come in, whether it was a painting class, a writing class, or even using the coffee shop side as a meeting space to really focus on bringing that same type of people depending on the event into the community for all the b excuse me, for all of the businesses to benefit.
09:48.846 Brandon Burton
I love that you didn't just sit back and hope something would better your situation there, but that you took some initiative and created these classes and things to bring in the people and to kind of evolve that to where you are today at the chamber and continue developing those events and things that help bring people in. I think that's a great lesson that even business owners that are listening. I know some some business owners come across this as well, but Take some action into your own hands if things aren't exactly how you'd like and not just rely on others or rely on the chamber to fix it. But there at the Sparta Chamber, can you give us some examples of some events that you guys do get behind and and kind of what those look like?
10:38.168 Rebecca Wildeboer
Sure. So one of the first things that I noticed when I started working here was that Sparta, like many rural communities, had a huge absence of either college students or people who maybe had an interest in things that were, I'm gonna say non-uh agriculture or non-traditional based. So I asked my kids who would be self-proclaimed geeks or nerds, and they were all in college or high school at the time. I said, would you guys stay and work here? And they all said no, that it was too small, too boring, nothing to do, nothing that would interest them. You know, they weren't into farming and tractors or you know, just very you know, everything that would say rule my kids were not interested in. And I said, Okay, well, what would I need to do to get people like you to at least come visit? And my youngest daughter, their avid reader, said, Well, you need to do something with Harry Potter, because all of my friends are into Harry Potter. Okay. And I said, Okay, well, let's make that happen. So my oldest daughter called her friends. They were, I think Probably sophomores in college at the time. And my other three kids called their friends. And we had a meeting in my living room that night. And we planned a festival around Harry Potter to speak exactly to that missed demographic. That's what we did. We ran a Harry Potter festival for five years, not because I have this passionate feeling towards Harry Potter, but what I did recognize was the same thing I recognized in my shop was that.
12:16.91 Brandon Burton
That's awesome.
12:31.104 Rebecca Wildeboer
The group that is missing is willing to come if you provide a reason for them to be there. And the first event I think drew it was very, very small budget, probably a few thousand people. But, you know, by last year, you know, we were able to capture about six thousand people and from all over the world. I think we had people from every state. many different countries. And yeah, it was a it's a great event. We chose to not continue it this year because we have something else that we would like to do that is a little bit more diverse, but the same concept that if you can look at we already know who's there, right? I think each community or business needs to do kind of like a SWOT analysis. You figure out what you have and then look for the holes. And if you can just improve, make a 1% improvement on what you're already doing, and then look at a targeted way to fill in those missing gaps, you're just providing a new reason for somebody to come or stay. And that's really all the Harry Potter Festival did. And then I took that same approach and applied it to absolutely everything. What can we do that no one around us is doing to attract a certain demographic? And will those people Spend money when they get here.
13:59.522 Brandon Burton
So how do you go about trying to figure out which demographic you want to attract?
14:04.514 Rebecca Wildeboer
Well, so I tend to look at the businesses. Well, for Harry Potter, I knew that what I was looking for were people who had families who maybe wanted to live or visit here. maybe they would be willing to travel a few minutes outside of Grand Rapids to discover a place in the country. you know, could they come in if they lived, you know. 20 minutes away, would they make a second trip back here if they drove past a restaurant that they didn't know was here? Up until that point, if you were say into reading or into movies, we don't have a bookstore, we don't have a movie theater, we don't have a dance club, you know, we didn't have anything that would appeal to your average college student or you know, we'll say Harry Potter fan. Science nerd, whatever that looked like, we had nothing. So what I was trying to do was to provide an outlet for those people to come and hope that once they got here, they would discover something that I was unaware would appeal to them. Appealing. You know, I just wanted them to drive by something and recognize that there was something here that would appeal to them or. Would they be willing to come back to future events because they liked our community?
15:30.582 Brandon Burton
So in using this example with the the Harry Potter event, how did you go about reaching out to that demographic to try to attract them? Were you just hitting some of the bigger surrounding cities or I mean, what did that scope look like as far as where you're trying to draw them in from?
15:49.454 Rebecca Wildeboer
So what I did was admit that I didn't know what I didn't know. And I utilized my kids and their friends. And I said, How do I talk to you? If I need to talk to more of you, how do I talk to you? And really, you talk to the people who who are interested in it, and they will give you all their answers. So we sat down and we set up a specific Facebook page for the event. And my kids started sharing about it and they would tweet. I was not on Twitter, but they tweeted about it. And I let them do the heavy lifting because they liked it. They were interested in it. And by year number one, the Facebook page had a huge following. And even this year, we announced that we would not be continuing that particular event. The page itself still has Close to 9,000 followers. So it just started to grow organically. And here's the beautiful thing when you run a niche type event, those people will talk to each other and they will promote for you because they will invite their like-minded friends. And it will just kind of grow organically. So we have a we always had a very small advertising budget for it. And we sell tickets. And I worked with nonprofits. So then the nonprofits would also do the heavy lifting. And they have turned out to be some of our best supporters because we are were able through a very low cost event to get them on board and to provide an opportunity for them also to generate awareness about their cause.
17:37.1 Brandon Burton
Now, how were you able to through this event specifically involve the your chamber members, the the business community?
17:45.602 Rebecca Wildeboer
Right. So what we did is look at ways that the chamber businesses would actually fit into the theme. And we had one bar in town or brewery in town and we asked them if they would create a Harry Potter esque menu for the day. special Butterbeer. And then we got the Grand Rapids Food Truck Association involved. And they would do they did a food truck rally and we just asked the businesses who chose to participate to step into the theme. And then you know, that event was successful and it grew. But what it really did was lay a foundation for every subsequent event for the businesses to see how if you stay and you're willing to work within this. event theme, you know, everyone can win. And I just applied that same concept to, you know, all we run many events and festivals here. and and we we do this with every single one. This is I set a theme. That's how I solidify the sponsorship. I let them know the theme is going to be X this year. This is what we are going to do. This is you know, who our target audience will be, and then I ask them, how would you like to get involved and how can we help your business reach its target demographic through this event and this theme? And what I've discovered is our businesses appreciate having a chance to have freedom within a specific boundary because they don't have to Create a marketing plan. I'm handing one to them. They're busy, they're running their business. I'm just saying, this is what we're going to do. This is when we're going to do it. This is what it's going to look like. And can you think of something small your business can do to fit within the structure of this particular event? So they don't they don't have to develop anything new. They just have to, you know, allow themselves.
20:08.434 Rebecca Wildeboer
a little bit of creative creative freedom within the boundaries that I'm providing for them. So it really removes the burden from them.
20:16.258 Brandon Burton
So were these businesses that chose to participate, did they see an uptick in business or was it mainly around the the event itself? Or I'm just trying to see the the overall effect into the community, what that looked like.
20:30.392 Rebecca Wildeboer
sure what ended up happening with that event is of course the people who you know traveled from out of state they would come back each year for the other festivals the events that were a little bit closer we started to discover that by tracking through I use event right by tracking through zip codes we were able to see where Certain areas in Michigan were having a higher representation traveling to other events throughout the year. And we started to do things like register to win or, you know, come to this other event with a drawing. And those people who are going to travel more than 20 minutes, you know, they're going to buy gas here, they're going to buy food here, they're going to have to go to the bathroom here. They are going to make a touch at some business in this town. There there's no way around it. so it just worked out really good that the businesses were able to see that on event night or day there would be additional traffic. And what I would say to them is, you know what, this might meet not be the event where your business is going to win. For example, we had a Gus Macker event here, you know, and it draws a particular crowd. That's basketball. And if, you know, basketball players and their families are typically not running in and getting their nails done or their hair done. But if they're spending at the local restaurant and then that waitress is making more tips that day, and then she can take some of her tip money and go get her nails done the next week. You know, that's the local thing. That's where we're providing the local businesses an opportunity to get new money into their business and their employees then can take that and make a local spend. Yeah.
22:37.396 Brandon Burton
Circulates more money into your local economy. That's great. I I like how you mentioned the Facebook group has over 9,000 people. So at some point, if you ever wanted to resurrect the Harry Potter event, you've got a base you can go to. But I was gonna ask about how you went about selling the tickets. So use an Eventbrite. If you're able to so you're able to capture some more data and information from these people. So you could reach out to them as you have other festivals and things that
23:05.602 Rebecca Wildeboer
And we have done that, yes. Yeah. Yeah.
23:08.428 Brandon Burton
Great. So maybe let's make the transition over to the sponsorship side. Sure. And how does that factor in?
23:17.55 Rebecca Wildeboer
So we have a festival that's been running for several years. It's had a few name changes. Now it's called Michigan Apple Fest. And you know, an Apple is just such a general thing. We recognize that the attendance probably wasn't as good as it could be. And the sponsorship wasn't as good as it could be. So I sat down and I looked and I asked myself, is the festival really broken? Or does the festival need to grow or go away? Or is it just not attracting the right people? Who are we talking to when we're marketing this festival? So I really took one year and I just observed. We just ran the festival as usual. And I really looked around, looked at, you know, who's coming, who's going, where can we make approvement improvements? I kind of did my own audit. You know, looked at who's sponsoring it, who's not. And are they just writing a check because that's what they've always done? And really are we doing the best that we can for those check writers? And the answer was no. So I took all the data that I had self-collected and said to myself, okay, so we need to focus less on, you know, the apple just being an apple and think about what does the apple represent to a larger group of people. And you know, the Apple represents health, the Apple represents a phone, the Apple represents a computer. You know, the list is just endless. So what I discovered was if we take what the Apple has done for Apple and everything else, and we apply that same thing here, not only can we grow the festival, but we also can provide more opportunities. For our sponsors to get involved and make a bigger spend or investment. That's what I like to call it with us. So I set a theme. the first year when I changed it, we wanted to focus on the apple and your life or lifestyle. So we focused on movement. And what I did was
25:30.702 Rebecca Wildeboer
Created a festival that was multi-faceted with faceted, excuse me, with things that were happening at the same time. you know, we know that social media is big because people it creates a fear of missing out. That's why, you know, people are checking their phone every, you know, second because they don't want to miss something. So if we tap into that fear of missing out and we have multiple things going on at the same time at any event, The people who miss something in year one might want to catch it in year two. So I was able to go to sponsors and say, okay, we are going to be doing all these things at this event. And this is the group we're hoping to attract. We're hoping to attract people who see, you know, health and wellness as an important factor in their life through the apple. We want families who love the wholesomeness of the apple. And, you know. Who who do you want your brand to reach? And I well, this year I worked with a credit union and they were looking at younger families who wanted to invest in their kids' education. And that was primarily that is our largest group who comes to this Apple Fest. They they tend to be families. And I said, okay, so what we're going to do is I'm going to give you some opportunities at the event that I think will work for you to reach your target audience, because I think that's something chambers need to really think about when they're running an event, especially a community one, is they have the power to put that business right in front of their target demographic, face to face. I mean they they own that and they that is where they can capitalize on that because they can allow that business to be in or out of the event based on their ability to write a check to support the event. So I said at the credit union you need families, you need kids. So we need to create an opportunity for the family and the kids to walk up to your tent or your booth.
27:50.156 Rebecca Wildeboer
rather than just you know walking past it while you hand out a brochure. And what we ended up doing was we created a scavenger hunt. I bought a bunch of hollow apples that we hid raffle ticket type things in and in six of these apples, I think we probably had a hundred in six of the apples there was a special token and The credit union was giving away gift cards to the people with a token. And then they had candy or treats for everyone else who just had a ticket. So we then through our social media and through our promotions of the event explained that there would be, you know, you have to find the apple hidden in the event. You bring the apple to this booth and you will collect your prize. So, of course, everyone was looking for the apple. I didn't want to hide the apple. What I did was ask our vendors. our craft vendors and our other participating vendors if they would hide the apple somewhere within their tent or their booth area. Yep. And so that encouraged people to go to the small booth, look at what the vendors were doing, whether it was a local business who was bringing a tent in or whether it was a craft vendor who was paying to be here. And then of course then mom, dad, kids, whoever took the apple back to the credit union and everybody won. And we would not have been able to do that if we were not focusing on a very narrow group of people.
29:22.038 Brandon Burton
I love that idea, the Apple Easter egg hunt, if you will. Yeah. You hear a lot of times at events like this where you have a punch card, you know, and go to every every booth, get a punch or whatever, and then you get a prize if you do all that. But being able to hide the apple in these different booths and tents and everything really becomes more interactive. It's more fun. It engages the people that are there at the event to really get in and interact with these vendors. I think that's a great idea.
29:48.46 Rebecca Wildeboer
That's what the business is. I'm I'm not opposed to taking, you know, 100, 200, 300, whatever dollar check. And I certainly will take whatever money somebody just wants to send us to support an event in exchange for logo placement. But my personal feelings are that chambers leave a lot of money on the table by not going and making not an ask, but asking a question. You know, these are the events we are running. And who do you need to reach? And then thinking a little bit about what their answer is and then presenting them an opportunity to reach their demographic through your event and allow commerce to be created in that footprint. It it just takes an extra step and it's no different than what I was doing in my business. I needed these people to come.
30:35.542 Brandon Burton
That's great.
30:42.838 Rebecca Wildeboer
I needed to provide the footprint for them to come and I needed to have something engaging enough for them to remember it and want to come back. Yeah.
30:51.17 Brandon Burton
Yeah, when you initially brought up the idea of what does an apple represent, I just have to share kind of where my mind went when you said that. I immediately went to the word potential. And you may be like, why, why would you go there? But I think that's such a powerful word. And oftentimes when I talk to somebody about it or just think about the what potential means, I'll reflect back to an apple seed. And how that apple seed becomes a tree and puts off fruit and what that fruit provides, you know, nourishment for people and animals and the tree provides, you know, shade and shelter for, you know, birds and squirrels and whatever and the wood. I mean, it's just it's an endless thing of the potential that comes from such a small seed. And I don't know, maybe that can be used in how you market the whole process with the the potential of an apple.
31:42.806 Rebecca Wildeboer
I love So my sweet spot, I think, or the place that I tend to look are businesses who either have or have had billboard space. Because if you have a chamber member who is buying a billboard and they're spending, you know, several thousand dollars on this billboard that they're hoping somebody is going to drive by and maybe see and maybe remember. And the odds are they're not. I mean, I will be honest, I have never done business based on a billboard, and that's just myself. But they obviously have marketing money and they're obviously looking for a customer. So if you can figure out a way to have them not spend on the billboard and make an investment with you where you can put them right in front of their people and you know, make a good case for that by listening to what they want. I I think most chambers would be very surprised that there is money out there. They just don't know where to spend it.
32:55.328 Brandon Burton
Especially if you find someone do you guys have those digital billboards in your tent? Especially those ones, 'cause you come up on right when you can actually read what it says and then it changes. And it's like, Well exactly th their marketing dollars were just wasted.
32:59.822 Rebecca Wildeboer
Yep, we do. Mm-hmm.
33:10.094 Rebecca Wildeboer
And if we have a there's a pizza place in a neighboring town and just a few miles away from our downtown. So we've got you know lots of tiny towns around here. And I happen to know the owner, and I said, Jeff, you know, what can I do to help you? Because I know you had a bull billboard, you know, but I can't believe That your billboard is really as good of an investment as you think it is. And he said, you know, I want everyone to see my look pizza box, my name on a pizza box. And I said, okay, well, we can make that happen. And I went back to my desk and I sat down and I looked at the events we were running. And I went back and presented him every opportunity where I thought he could get a pizza box in someone's hands. And this little mom and pop business wrote me a very, very, you know, large check, several thousand dollars, more than they would have spent on a billboard because he was given multiple opportunities to have his box immediately placed in someone's hand. You know, and and you can't do that with a billboard.
34:30.294 Brandon Burton
No, no, that's a great example. I am curious though, is his billboard still up?
34:35.66 Rebecca Wildeboer
He does not have billboard this year. No, he will be a good investor next year. Yeah.
34:40.088 Brandon Burton
Yeah, that's great.
34:42.254 Rebecca Wildeboer
I I know that a lot of chambers feel they're not a marketing agency and they're not an ad agency, but I really think that they need to rethink that and say, maybe for the large companies who have staff and, you know, an unlimited budget, they maybe don't need the chamber to help them with this. But The truth is what I learned having my own small business is that you are so busy trying to run your business, keep the doors open, you know, not work for free for yourself all the time, that basic marketing plans or even, you know, figuring out how to find the time to get yourself involved is very overwhelming. You know, you're too busy running your business to think about how to market or manage the business. And I really believe the chamber has a great opportunity there to just run alongside these businesses, not to do it for them, but to show them a very clear path to be successful at certain times of the year.
35:50.806 Brandon Burton
Yes. I love that. You don't have to be a marketing agency, but help make the businesses in your community more profitable. Help them be more successful. And I can see that even on a individual level with chambers as they have chamber directories and different publications. Get them out there in the community. They do no good sitting at the front desk of your chamber. Get them out there and leverage that. So the businesses that are spending money in there or even just your members that are listed in there. Get them out in the community and help them get that return and make those businesses more successful.
36:25.364 Rebecca Wildeboer
I think the other thing that especially small chambers need to do is to realize chamber member or not, you need there has to be room for everyone at the table because your chamber member businesses are likely dependent on non-chamber businesses. So you're not helping your members by always excluding the non-members. They have something to offer, even if what they're offering is a sizable sponsorship without a membership, take the money and run. Because if you can use that to create a better event that your businesses will, your chamber member businesses will benefit from, you're helping them.
37:13.75 Brandon Burton
Yep. Call it a trial of what the chamber can do for that business. Right.
37:17.14 Rebecca Wildeboer
Exactly. And we also have to acknowledge, you know, the chamber isn't going to be everything for everybody. But that doesn't mean that every successful business who chooses not to join doesn't have something to offer to the ones who have chosen to join. So you can really be friendly and helpful, or you can kind of have a closed door policy. Now I do think there are some things that should be member exclusives and And I'm all for that. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a membership. But I I do think that chambers need to rethink going forward what that's going to look like because I am invited all the time to many different networking groups and functions and business type functions that have nothing to do with the chamber. And these businesses are choosing to not join the chamber. They have found a way through social media to do almost everything on their own to network together, to support each other. And, you know, they're bypassing what the chamber had to offer because the tools are ev available, you know, you can Google it and you can host your own event and you can get to know people. And so in my opinion, for the chamber to remain viable, especially in a smaller community, you have to use everything that's available and play up those strengths to the member businesses and be that central like a central processing organization. You want everybody to come here and then the people who are paying to be members get that extra touch.
38:53.23 Brandon Burton
Yep. Be that go-to resource. So I know we're running a little bit long, so we'll we'll start wrapping this up here. I I really appreciate it. What is one action item we can take from our discussion today that a chamber can apply and really to take their chamber up to the next level?
38:55.971 Rebecca Wildeboer
Yeah.
39:15.426 Rebecca Wildeboer
My thoughts on that are look and see what you are doing within your community immediately, right now, that is drawing someone from outside of the community to come there. That is new money. And if the answer is you're doing nothing, find one thing. Find one thing to do to bring new money in.
39:38.808 Brandon Burton
Sounds easy enough. Sounds too easy. so then the question that I I like to ask everyone that I have on the show is as we look to the future, okay. How do you how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose going forward?
39:55.258 Rebecca Wildeboer
My belief is that the purpose of obviously a larger chamber is going to have the power of ag advocacy. I think for smaller chambers, they are going to have absolutely the power to be the connector. Yeah. They can be the connector.
40:12.914 Brandon Burton
Absolutely. I appreciate your perspective that you brought to this discussion today. It I think it's great and a lot of chamber professionals will be able to get a lot of value out of that. If a a listener wanted to get in contact with you and maybe dive in a little bit more about how you've done some of these events and how you work your sponsorships for these events, how might somebody best get in contact with you?
40:39.576 Rebecca Wildeboer
Sure, they can email me at events at Sparta I dot or G. That goes directly to me.
40:48.032 Brandon Burton
All right. And we will get that updated in the show notes page for this episode, which can be found at chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode fifty-one. But again, Rebecca, thank you so much for spending time with us today. And I hope everybody gets a lot of value out of this episode.
41:06.104 Rebecca Wildeboer
Thank you for having me, Brandon.
41:08.512 Brandon Burton
If you are a Chamber professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple Podcasts, 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 Chamberchat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry.

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

Episode 50 — Lessons Learned in 2019
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Solo
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.842 Brandon Burton
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.
00:14.988 Brandon Burton
And now your host, he has a goal to positively affect over one million businesses through this podcast. He's my dad, Brandon Burton. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. This is Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. Wow, this is episode 50 of Chamber Chat Podcast. And when I started this almost a year ago, 50 episodes seemed Like so far in the future. But yet here we are, and it's gone by very quickly. I it's been a lot of fun. So as I look back on this past year, in this episode, I decided I'm gonna kind of take maybe a top 10 list of things, lessons that I've learned from this past year in doing this podcast. And It just kind of fair warning as I get into this episode and and going through this top ten list, I'm gonna be referencing several of the past episodes that I've done and I'll have links to them all on the on the show notes page for this episode, which will be found at chamber chatpodcast dot com slash episode fifty. So if you wanna if you hear something I say that you wanna dig in deeper and see what it was about, Chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode 50 is where you'll find those show notes. So as I was looking at the top 10 lessons that I've learned this year through doing you know hosting Chamber Chat Podcast, the number one thing that I I've learned is just that the chamber community is full of great people who are willing to help others to be successful. And I've known that. But being able to see the gratitude and the just the open arms of the whole chamber community and all these people that I've had on the show as guests and their willingness to to come on, share their insights, and they do this all in an effort to make everybody else better, to help lift other others up and to get their message out there. And I'm just so appreciative to everybody who has been a guest on the show.
02:37.694 Brandon Burton
and who's contributed in any way to helping this chamber chat podcast get traction and and get legs throughout the chamber world. Just I I can't be more grateful than yeah for what all of you have done. The second lesson that I've learned this year from doing Chamber Chat Podcast, I learned these tips about chamber travel events and inner city trips, especially in the episode that I had with Bob Quick, and that was episode forty two. So again, as I reference any of these episodes, you can find those episodes at chamberchatpodcast.com slash and then episode and the number. Or you can go to the show notes page and direct link to them. So anyways, let me get back to so the second lesson I learned is around the travel events and inner city trips to learn from other communities. Now I've been to n quite a number of chamber conferences and I always see these things and hear about chamber travel trips and these trips to China and overseas and all these different things. And I've never quite understood what the purpose was. Call me naive. I don't know. I just I had a hard time connecting those dots. But my eyes were just totally opened as I had Bob Quick on the show. And as he talked about what their chamber there at Commerce Lexington is able to learn from these other communities throughout the world. And these inner city trips with other chambers that are similar in size and demographics, it really opened my eyes to that, you know, what we can learn from others, but also that networking that happens from all those community leaders and everybody that goes on those trips together. And the more I thought about it, I thought really that coin coincides so well.
04:43.138 Brandon Burton
with the purpose of Chamber Chat Podcast. As I just developed this podcast, the whole idea was to be able to help make your chamber members and your community to be able to help you serve your members and your community better. And we learn how to serve better by learning from others. Whether that's on an inner city trip or through listening to an interview of a chamber president or some other chamber professional. telling how they do things in their community and being able to find those nuggets that you can apply back at your chamber. So that that really resonated with me and seeing that I'm I'm right on track, right on course with this podcast. And it just it was great. So the third lesson I learned in this 2019 from doing chamber chat podcast is that a chamber can and should be much more than a networking business community. And with this item we can reference episode 44 with Libby Spears and episode 46 with Roy Williams. And Libby talked about how a chamber should be the go-to resource to for education, for anything in the community for information. And Roy Williams at the Oklahoma Greater Oklahoma City Chamber really has kind of blown the top off as to what the capacity of a chamber can be. And if you miss that episode, I would definitely go back and listen to that one again because the Oklahoma City Chamber is really on the cutting edge of being able to see the need in a community, in their community. create a program and oftentimes they'll spin it off to somebody else in the community who can run and manage it going forward. But chambers no longer just the good old boy club of networking, which most of you listening to this know that, but my eyes were just opened, especially in that episode with Roy Williams as to the what the potential of a chamber can and should be. The fourth lesson that I wanted to highlight was the importance of staying true to your strategic plan.
07:03.362 Brandon Burton
And we can point to episode 40 with Henry Floorsham. And he talked about blowing things up in his strategic plan. And I like the idea of being able to say no to things that don't fit into what your strategic plan is. Anything that takes you off course is a distraction. So stay say no to those distractions, stay true to your plan. You can keep a note. Or keep notes of what some of those no's are. So as you reevaluate your strategic plan going forward, you can see what changes you might need to make and strategies you need to implement. But stay true to your strategic plan. The number five lesson is that most of you know this, that digital is important. But I'm not gonna end there. So digital is important, but print is still very relevant. And Justin Starlin in episode thirty-one really talked about how their chamber does a printed newsletter that they send out throughout the whole community. And I forget the number, I wanna say it's like eight thousand copies they print each month. It might be more than that. I I can't remember off the top of my head. But they print a hard copy of it and mail it out to everyone in their community, not just members. And the traction That that has gotten for their chamber by having that printed material and establishing the brand of their chamber in their community has just been outstanding. And Justin couldn't talk enough about how important that print material is for them. And that's just scratching the surface as far as print material. In episode 15, we had Lane Mullenon from Community Matters, the chamber publisher, and talked about the both digital strategies as well as printed strategies for chamber directories and maps and and the distribution on those and why that is still an important way to to serve your chamber members and your community. But you can also learn more about community matters and what they what services they offer for chamber directories and maps and magazines.
09:27.718 Brandon Burton
at cham at chamber chatpodcast dot com slash cmi and there you can there's a form you can fill out to if you wanted to get a quote about getting a publication done for your chamber. The number six item that I'll touch on on this top 10 list is the importance of great community partnerships. And both Jenna Armstrong in episode 18 and Becky Womble in episode three talked about the importance of having great community partnerships. And I think that's something that that we all know. it's just neat hearing from other people's perspectives how they were able to leverage some of these communities. Partnerships in their community to overcome some struggles and difficult situations. And it it's always nice to be able to learn from others and see how they've been able to come through some of those challenges. Number seven is the importance of talent and workforce development. Now, I had done a series, the Chamber of the Year finalist series for 2019. which encompassed episodes twenty-four through thirty-five. So we had the the twelve finalists for Chamber of the Year. And as I had them tell about their chambers and kind of what was in their synopsis for their application with Chamber of the Year, almost every single one of them talked about talent and workforce development. And it's so important as we see the change in education systems in colleges and universities and the rising cost of student debt and things of of that nature, as well as a struggling workforce in in many areas, it it just makes perfect sense for the chamber to be in alignment with these educational institutions, school districts, and workforce development to see what those needs are in your community and to be able to help align the education so you have a strong workforce to fill those holes.
11:42.19 Brandon Burton
And just seeing that that was such a strong strong thread amongst so many of these Chamber of the Year finalists shows that that's a need and something of importance for chambers throughout the whole country. The number eight item that I'll cover is there's no such thing as too much non-dues revenue. Am I right? I think every chamber out there knows that. We can't just get by anymore on chamber dues, membership dues, that it's a matter of having good quality programming and events that will help drive that non-dues revenue. And I can see a time in the future where we don't even call it non-dues revenue anymore. It'll just be revenue and maybe revenue from dues. So maybe that'll be the distinction is is the dues revenue and everything else will just be revenue. But I have partnered i i back in episode seventeen, I had Kevin Hodas, who's the founder of Swipe It. He was a guest on the podcast, and he talked about a partnership that ChamberTap Podcast has with his company as a credit card processor to provide a chamber affinity or affiliate program that allows swipe it as a credit card processor to save your chamber money and your processing fees, but also to have this affiliate program going forward. So as you're able to recommend swipe it and to your members and and have other businesses sign up that your chamber can actually earn a commission from the credit card fees that get processed. And swipe its fees are very low. So I mean you're not going to get rich off of this program, but It is something that builds up year after year and continues to be added upon. And there's chambers I know that are I mean, they're seeing five to seven thousand dollars a month or five, sorry, five to seven thousand dollars a year on non-dues revenue from credit card affinity program. So if you don't have a credit card affinity program, check out Swipe It. Kevin's a great guy, great company, one of the best in the business.
14:08.246 Brandon Burton
And you can learn more about swipe it at chamberchatpodcast.com slash CC. And that CC stands for credit card. So chamberchatpodcast.com slash CC. Number nine is the future is bright for chambers that stay relevant with technology and even automation. And we've had a lot of people on the show talking about how bright the future is for chambers. And we had Tony Felker in episode five, who talked about the importance of staying relevant as a chamber. We had Frank Kenney in episode sixteen talk about the importance of technology and social media, that digital presence and how to leverage that amongst your your chamber. And then just recently we had Jonathan Packer from the Austin Chamber, and he talked about automation, which is I I that wasn't all he talked about, but that was one of the key things that he did touch upon. And being able to take some of the burden of some of those repetitive tasks that are on your your chamber staff, things l such as invoicing and just some of those kind of things that are not personable and just really time consuming. And being able to automate some of those tasks so that those staff members are free to better serve your members and To be out in the community being seen and interacting with businesses and and the people in general. So I think that's so true. For the future to be right for chambers, you need to stay relevant. And for a lot of that relevancy, technology and automation is going to be right up there to to keep you relevant. Now, number 10, this is something that we didn't have anybody necessarily talk directly towards in these This past year of doing the podcast. But it's something that I've gathered as I have talked to several chambers and and even talking to some of the these chamber people off the air. And that is every chamber should explore the option of producing their own podcast. And several have already reached out to me about doing this. So much so that I'm starting to put together
16:38.706 Brandon Burton
A a guide, kind of a step by step guide of how to get started with creating your own podcast. And and that'll, I'm sure, evolve from being a guide to maybe a tutorial and maybe some services and things that I can help provide to help get you up and going at your chamber with your own podcast. And there's a lot of reasons why. you may want to consider having your own podcast for your chamber. And I'll probably do a future episode where that's all we talk about is why your chamber should have a podcast. And we'll go into some of those those reasons and kind of why you'd want to dive into that and and take that task on. But for some of you you already know the reasons why and you just need to know how. What do you need to do to get on board and to To get that ball rolling. So if you go to chamberchatpodcast.comslash guide, I will be creating this step-by-step guide to get started with your own podcast. Depending on when you listen to this, when you go to that site, I may or may not have that already ready. But if you enter in your your contact information, then I will email it to you as soon as it is ready. Or if it already is ready, then you'll get it right away in your email box again, depending on when you listen to this. But again, that's chamberchatpodcast.com slash guide to be able to get that step by step guide as to how to do your own podcast at your chamber. So I'm having a blast. I love this. I love doing chamber chat podcasts. I think that number one lesson that I've learned about how great. the people in the chamber community are is really what's most important. I love you guys. I'm glad you're out there. I'm glad you're part of this chamber chat podcast community. Keep listening. Please share this out with everyone in that you know in the chamber industry. we can always get more listeners and get more people on board in our community. So again, thanks for being here and I look forward to another great year in 2020.
19:05.876 Brandon Burton
And seeing what lessons I learned there. Again, show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode fifty. If you are a Chamber Professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple Podcasts, 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.

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

Episode 49 — Take the Stairs
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Solo
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.842 Brandon Burton
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.
00:15.082 Brandon Burton
And now your host, his favorite Christmas movie is a Christmas story. He's my dad, Brandon Burton. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. This is episode forty-nine and I am Brandon Burton. It is my goal to help introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. In that introduction, this was my daughter Ella giving that little snippet about me with my favorite. Christmas movie being a Christmas story. And just as a side note to that, if you want to get a a good little chuckle around Christmas time, look up Tony Moline from the Cedar Park Chamber, his Facebook page. And through the month of December he's been doing a fun little yeah, every day he puts up a little picture and quotes from the movie Christmas Story. And I've just been loving it. But this week's episode I decided to do another book review and a couple months ago I had done a book review of Pat Flynn's new book, Superfans, and that got pretty good feedback from listeners, so I thought, well, I'll do another book review and I may do these periodically as I come across good books that I think can be applied to your chamber or to you individually to help level up your game and to Help you better serve your members and your community. So this week, the book that I'll be going over is called Take the Stairs by Rory Vaden. It's seven steps to achieving true s true success. And the overall theme, I guess, of the book is that it it's about what successful people do to be successful. And the title Being called Take the Stairs. So let me back up. I first was introduced to this book, it was probably five or six years ago, and Rory was a speaker at TCCE, and he was giving away his books as he was a speaker there at the conference. So I got a copy of the book and thought I was kind of intrigued by the title and read into the introduction, and it really started to kind of suck me in. And at the beginning of the
02:41.868 Brandon Burton
The book, the very first paragraph. I'm gonna go ahead and read that because it kind of sets the table for why the book is called Take the Stairs and kind of what he dives into. So this is the first paragraph. It says, The last time you came up to a set of stairs and an escalator, did you take the stairs? If you're like 95% of the world, then you probably didn't. Most people don't. Most of the time we look for shortcuts. We all want to be successful. And we all want to have a happy life, but we constantly look for the easy way. We look for the escalator in hopes that life will be easier. Unfortunately, in our search for making things easier, we are actually making them worse. And that goes into kind of alludes to what he calls a pain paradox, which I'll touch on in just a min in a in a moment here. But as I first picked up this book and was reading through the introduction. so I I kind of started reading it and then I put it down because I got caught up with just the busyness of life. But there was a paragraph that every time I'd see the book laying on my desk or bookshelf, I would remember this paragraph and it made me keep pulling the book out. And and I say that like it it was hard to get into. The book is very easy read and kind of entertaining. I I really did enjoy the read. But in this introduction, he says, according to one American publisher, 95% of all books that are published are never completely read. Says, and congratulations, you made it this far, because 70% of all books ever purchased are never even opened. And that just opened my eyes and I thought, okay, well, game's on. Yeah, if 95% of all books that are purchased are never completely read, I'm gonna completely read this book. Which I have now, so I'm part of that five percent, I guess. But it really is a a good book. So the I would say maybe the overall theme of the book is what Rory calls a rent axiom. He says, Success is never owned, it is rented, and the rent is due every day. So that gives you something to ponder on. But why take the stairs?
05:04.364 Brandon Burton
He talks about America being sick. People look for the short term easy, like taking the elevator or escalator, rather than the short term difficult, which would be taking the stairs. And this is a very simple example, but it's very effective. And believe it or not, for the last, you know, five or six years, ever since I got my hands on this book, whenever I'm faced with an e an elevator or a set of stairs, I always take the stairs because of Kind of the principles that he's laid out in this book. maybe the exception is if I have luggage or something and I need to take an elevator for that. But there's a few quotes from the book that really stood out to me. So I'll share a few of these quotes and maybe share some thoughts along with them. But Rory talks a lot about the importance of self-discipline. And he states, we have no accountability because we allow each other to get away with debt. indulgence and procrastination. And he goes on to say that successful people have the self-discipline to do things they don't want to do. And I thought that was pretty eye-opening that we don't have accountability because we let each other get away with debt, indulgence and procrastination. Those are three things that really diminish accountability and self discipline. So in order to be successful, we have to get out of our comfort zone, we need to do things that we don't necessarily want to do. And I I wouldn't say not want to do, but it may be a a discomfort. And really our natural tendencies are to avoid discomfort. So just human nature is to to go the easy way and to try to stay as comfortable as possible. But you don't find success by being comfortable. So another quote that stood out to me He says, as it turns out, distraction is a dangerously deceptive saboteur of our goals. And I think that that word distraction really stands out to me. And I I like to think of words and their meanings, but if you look at the word distraction, that means it's taking you off track. Dis distraction is taking you off track. So
07:30.112 Brandon Burton
What are you what is your traction? What are you on track for? And today we have so many distractions from our cell phone to social media to emails to your computer, your phone ringing, the constant buzzing and beeping and lights and everything that we're surrounded with, let alone when you do sit down to watch Netflix or something, it's so easy to just get sucked in and then it automatically plays the next episode. So very easy to become distracted. But when you think about it, if we don't know what our traction is, we don't know what our what track we're on, we don't really have any right to say that we're being distracted by social media or distracted by that phone call if we don't know what track we're on. So we need to be very definitive about our day, about our schedule, and be able to stay on track and be able to avoid those distractions. So I had mentioned earlier that Rory mentions a pain paradox. So the short-term easy sets us up for long-term difficult. And then the opposite is true. The short-term difficult sets us up for long-term easy. And the example that he gives for this was really a good visual. He said he grew up in Colorado. And for those of you listening that are in Colorado, you may know this principle already, but He said in the part of Colorado he lived in, they had both buffalo and cattle. And whenever a a big thunderstorm would come in, might have hail and you know just a nasty storm, that the cows would tend to run away from the storm. They would try to outrun it. And the buffalo would run towards a storm. So the difference is as the buffalo would run towards a storm, the storm would pass over them. And their time being exposed to that inclement weather and the hailstones and everything was minimal because they're charging towards it. And so the storm's passing them as they're running towards it, where the cows that are trying to outrun the storm, they it's that short-term easy. They're trying to procrastinate that storm, and they end up being underneath the storm and getting pelted with the hailstones for a lot longer because they're going along with the
09:54.712 Brandon Burton
the direction and speed of the storm. So that that just resonated really well with me. That pain paradox again. Yes, short term easy sets us up for long term difficult. And short term difficult sets us up for long term easy. One of the next principles that Rory talks about is integrity and the importance of doing what we say we will do. So our words we should Be using our words to help build people up and to not tear them down and to see people as they can become, or one of my favorite words, to see their potential. So if in regards to integrity, he talked about if if we just always assume that the mic is on, we see some of these things in the news or especially the politicians where they get caught, you know, saying something while the mic is on. if we just assume that the mic is always on and everyone will hear what we say, then that'll keep us in check as to to having integrity. And a good example of this is there's a another podcast that I listen to, the guy named Dave Melter, and he has a camera on him at all times. So he has a crew that follows him around, and oftentimes his podcast episode will just be taking audio from whatever he says on camera. But because he has this camera crew with him all the time, he really does always have the mic on. And he's mentioned how that really keeps him on track with the schedule. It keeps him having an integrity in doing what he says he's going to do because he's accountable and anybody who's watching can see what he's doing. Now that's really extreme, but if you can visualize that and kind of pretend that you have a a little camera floating around with you or a microphone that and really i may be listening right with Alexa and and Siri and all that hey we may have the microphones actually listening to us. But live our days with intention, study our calendar and make sure that we're filling in that white space of our calendar with good actionable items that will keep us on track and and avoid distraction.
12:18.284 Brandon Burton
So Rory talks about perspective. And this example that he gave really helped me visualize. I mean, we all have bad days, right? And it's often, I mean, it's easy to look at a bad day and think, man, this this can ruin my week, my month. Some people will really blow it out of proportion. It can ruin their year. You know, this year was so bad because of whatever. And whatever they list out, really, when you take it down. was just a couple of days maybe in that year, but they write off the whole year as being bad because of those couple of days. So when Rory talks about perspective, he's he says to picture a measuring tape that's eighty feet long. And each foot represents about a year of your life. So say on average, people live about eighty years, each each foot is a year. So each foot has twelve inches, which you could say represent a month. And so each month and a year. So then one day in a month would be one thirtieth of an inch. So when you consider when you have a bad day and looking at it in perspective of your life, or you know, just of the year even, that one thirtieth of an inch is really nothing. It's not a big deal. And if we can keep that big picture and keep that perspective, then we can move on through that. Now, as people set out to go after goals and to reach their reach towards their potential, Rory lists a few different reasons for inaction, why they hesitate and and don't go for for whatever their potential is or that goal. And he says these reasons for inaction are fear, entitlement, and perfectionism. And he says it can often take more energy to decide to go do something than to do the actual thing. And you think about that going to the gym. Some people will sit there and decide, you know, am I gonna go? Am I not gonna go? Am I gonna go? Am I not gonna go? And that mental energy they're spending really is taking a lot of energy where if they would just get up and go, then they could have the thing done already. So
14:44.902 Brandon Burton
This quote really r stood out to me. He says, It is more comfortable and convenient to let our dreams disappear than to muster the discipline and work ethic to turn them into reality. And you might want to back that up and listen to that again, but that is it's more comfortable and convenient to let our dreams disappear. And that kind of stabs you to the heart. So if you know if you have dreams. you don't want to give in to comfort and convenience. You wanna work through them, get out of your comfort zone and reach that potential. So he gave an example of this, a reason for inaction of being fear. And he talked about when he was a a kid growing up, he and his brother, they would they were into sports and they had this it was a football. It was actually a Garfield football. So it had Garfield character with the big eyeballs and everything on this football. But they were playing catch with this football outside and their neighbor, they were in a trailer park, and their neighbor in this trailer park was this was the scary house. You know, everybody has that scary house in their neighborhood that you make up ideas and and kind of a background story to this person is a a crazy person or whatever. You know, as a kid you come up with these crazy stories. But he and his brother had this story made up about this neighbor that was just scary. And one day as they're playing catch with this football, it goes over the fence into the the neighbor's yard. And before this happened, he and his brother would dare each other to just go knock on the neighbor's door. And they were both so afraid to go into their their yard that neither one of them would ever go knock on their door. But once that football went over the fence, they had no choice. It i I guess they did. They could just not have a football anymore and then they they were just out of luck. Or they could muster up the courage to go on the other side of the fence and get the football. So they were committed. Once the ball was over the fence, they were committed to get it back and they had to overcome that fear. And I think I came across something similar to that as I was deciding to start the pod this podcast.
17:09.965 Brandon Burton
for Chamber Chat Podcast. I had thought of the idea of doing it probably, I don't know, five or six months before I actually launched it. And there's some setup and things to to get things in order before launching the podcast, but I could have been putting it off indefinitely. And my kind of throwing the football over the fence, if you will, was I created a list of the top ten people that I wanted to reach out to to have on the podcast as guests as I first started. And a lot of these were people that I knew from the industry and people that I knew would be friendly and and would accept a invitation to be my guest on the podcast. And I threw that football over the fence by sending out an invitation to each one of them and saying I'm doing this. I'm creating this podcast. It's a podcast for chamber professionals to be able to learn from others, get ideas from each other, and be able to implement those ideas back at their chamber. Will you be one of my first guests? I don't have any listeners yet, but I need a guest. And once I sent out those first few invitations, I was scared. I didn't know what kind of response I would get. but That was me throwing the football over the fence. And luckily I got great response back. very willing candidates to to come on the show. I had Page Michel and and Becky Womble and Tony Falker, those are some of the the first ones I had on. And very appreciative to them for I guess letting me get that football back and and helping things not be so scary. But Rory says, says it's okay to be scared, just do it scared. So one of these next items that that Rory talks about is commitment. And I think commitment is such a big deal. He talks about the there's a decision point where as you're deciding whether or not to do something, there's a certain point where you're all in.
19:32.49 Brandon Burton
And until you you're at that all in stage, you you can always be asking yourself, should I or shouldn't I? Should I or shouldn't I? And at some point, once you're all in, then you're 100% and there's no going back. So anytime that you're not 100%, then you're always asking should. And if we can get away from asking should I, and instead ask how How can I, then that changes from a should I to a commitment, to a hundred percent commitment. And he has a a quote of it says, one brilliant aspect of the human mind is that once we start asking the question, how our creativity engages. And I think that is so important that we need to be asking how. And a lot of times just in life, Take the the example of growing up and your parents may say, We can't. We don't have the money for this. We can't do this. We can't do that. And maybe instead of saying you can't, you say, How can you? And find a solution that engages your creativity. It gets your mind to start thinking of answers rather than shutting down. And then he talks about not putting conditions on your commitment. And I'd never never really thought about this. aspect of of commitment before. But the example that he gives is you know, when people get married and not trying to to rock any boats here. I know everybody has different situation different marital situations, but I thought the the example he gave was was pretty strong. So he he says For example, in marriage we say I do until death do us part, but in all too many cases what we're really saying is I do until you get fat, you make less money, you cheat on me, you till the kids are grown, till one of us meets someone else, or what we might be saying is I do until or
21:56.384 Brandon Burton
I do as long as we have money or we have great sex or we're happy or it's convenient. And really, those are just outs that they're ways to get out and they're conditions upon a commitment. And when we make commitments, we need to be all in. We need to have that 100% commitment in how do we get through this rather than should I get through this? And Rory brings up the example of the difference between two hundred and eleven and two hundred and twelve degrees. That one degree is what creates turns water into steam and that steam can power a locomotive, and that one degree is what gives us one hundred percent commitment. So we need to find that that focal point where it turns from a should I into a how and that power that comes with commitment. He also talks about how focus is power in an example of magnifying glass at the focal point and the the power that comes through that magnifying glass to start a fire by having that that sharp focus. Talks about Mr. or Mr. Mediocrity. And Mr. Mediocrity is the voice in your head that keeps you from going after your potential. He says, silence Mr. with positive self thoughts. And he says to to use those positive self thoughts because no two thoughts can occupy the same space. And when I read that, there's a guy named Dr. Daniel Eamon. And he talks about what he calls ants, with A N T S for automatic negative thoughts. And you can do a search for him, Dr. Daniel Eymon. I'll put a link to him in the show notes as well, but he has some some neat thoughts about how to overcome these automatic negative thoughts and to be able to have those positive self-thoughts with you at all times. And then the final principle that I'll touch on from Take the Stairs is Rory talks about visioneering, which is a word that he made up. So visioneering is a combination of vision and
24:21.874 Brandon Burton
and engineering. So you need to have a clear vision of what it is that you want and then engineer the life to fit that vision. So create systems and the power of writing your vision down and your plan will really help you to be able to execute. And he gave a great example of him writing down what he wanted his future to look like. And I forget the amount of time like within a year or two years or something after writing down that plan, he was living the plan that he had written down. I mean, and I've I've heard other stories of of people doing the same thing. So if you doubt it, try it. And this is one of those things where the downside is not too big. I mean it takes a few minutes to write down a plan and then create your life around it and see how it works for you. But thank you for tuning in today. I hope you got something out of this book review of mine for Take the Stairs by Rory Vaden. I'll have a link to the book in the show notes page, which can be found at Chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode forty-nine. And if you like this, I will I'll plan on doing some other book reviews in the future. Thanks a lot. If you are a chamber professional Please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify. When you subscribe to Chamberchat 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 Chamberchat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry.
26:18.678 Brandon Burton
Every chamber is looking for new ways to increase their non-dues revenue. Has your chamber found a good affinity program? I have a great affinity program to offer your chamber that will continue to increase in revenue year after year. I want to introduce you to Swipe It for all of your credit card processing needs. Swipe It has a unique affinity program that 1.2 Helps your chamber members be more profitable, and three, provides recurring nondues revenue to your chamber. To learn more, please visit chamberchappodcast.com slash CC for credit card. Again, Chamberchappodcast.com slash C C and get swiping with swipe it.

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

Episode 48 — Aligning Your Programming & Advocacy Efforts with Mirinda Rothrock
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Mirinda Rothrock
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.842 Brandon Burton
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.
00:14.434 Brandon Burton
And now your host. He has been serving the chamber industry for over 13 years. Brandon Burton. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. This is Brandon Burton, your host, and thank you for joining us here for episode 48 of Chamber Chat Podcast. Today, our guest who's gonna spend some time with us is Mirinda Rothrock, president of the Decatur Regional Chamber in Illinois.
00:41.494 Brandon Burton
Mirinda, her 30 years of leadership experience and covenus manager of community engagement for one of the largest agricultural processors in the world to her current position as president of the Decatur Regional Chamber of Commerce. She oversees key programs, events, and has increased all aspects of chamber membership. She works with the Chamber's Board and Executive Committee to strengthen the organization's focus and planning while continuing to promote Opportunity, growth, and prosperity in local commerce. Mirinda was born and raised in Decatur, Illinois, graduated from Milliken University with a Bachelor of Science in Management and Organizational Leadership. She serves on the board of directors for the Illinois Chamber of Commerce Executives, Regional Planning Commission, Workforce Investment Board, Economic Development Corporation of Decatur and Macon County, and the Decatur Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. She volunteers for many community initiatives and is a member of the Mount Zion Christian Church. She is married and has four children. today, as Miranda's here on the show with us, we're gonna be covering topics and ideas around advocacy and programming. And we'll jump right into this as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsor. Every chamber is looking for new ways to increase their non-dues revenue. Has your chamber found a good affinity program? I have a great affinity program to offer your chamber that will continue to increase in revenue year after year. I want to introduce you to Swipe It for all of your credit card processing needs. Swipe It has a unique affinity program that 1. Helps your chamber members be more profitable, and three provides recurring non-dues revenue to your chamber. To learn more, please visit chamberchapodcast.com slash CC for credit card. Again, ChamberchapPodcast.com slash C C and get swiping with swipe it. All right, Mirinda, we are back. Thank you for joining us today here on ChamberThat Podcast. Please
03:01.216 Brandon Burton
Say hello to the audience and if you would, share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
03:07.87 Mirinda Rothrock
Sure. Hello. So pleased to be here with you, Brandon. Something unique and usual, I guess, about me. you know, this is my second career. in my bio, I was manager of community engagement for Archer Daniels Midland Company, ADM, one of the largest agricultural processing companies. and this is my second career here at the Chamber of Commerce. I've been here now eight full years.
03:35.382 Brandon Burton
All right. That's awesome to be able to be successful in two different areas. Not many people can say that about their careers. So great job. can you share with us a little bit about the Decatur Chamber, size, location, budget, just so listeners can relate to kind of your point of view of where you're coming from in your chamber.
03:55.96 Mirinda Rothrock
Well, I'm super proud of our Decatur Regional Chamber of Commerce. We recently went through a rebranding and renaming. So we just made this launch on November the first. So really excited about taking an a new look about a a regional aspect as well. So we're located here in the Midwest, Decatur, Illinois. We're about three hours south of Chicago. we have about six hundred and eighty members, and our budget is about a little over half a million dollars.
04:26.444 Brandon Burton
Right. Very good. That's very respectable and will help the listeners be able to see kind of where you're coming from as you talk about advocacy and programming with us today. So
04:38.144 Mirinda Rothrock
Right, I feel like we've fallen a really good middle line. We're not super small, but we're certainly not large. We kind of really hit that middle of the road.
04:46.754 Brandon Burton
Which I think is where a large majority of the chambers across the country are at is kind of in that that range where you are maybe four hundred to eight hundred members kind of in that range. So you're right in the middle there. and budget wise, very similar as well. So as we come to the the topic for discussion today of advocacy and programming, what are some of your thoughts around that? Why is that why is this topic so important to you?
05:15.702 Mirinda Rothrock
I really believe that in my short time in the chamber world compared to many others, I believe that advocacy and aligning your programming is just vital for chambers of commerce to help prepare, educate, and really serve as a resource for our membership.
05:33.048 Brandon Burton
Think that's great. I know, I know with the a lot of chambers, advocacy can be kind of a tricky thing as far as showing your value to the community. we we all know being tied in with the the chambers, you know, the the purpose and role of a chamber, why advocacy is so important. But when you try to communicate that importance to your membership in general, I hear chamber members all over the country that maybe they have a different idea of what a chamber should do. And when they come across it, they they don't realize the importance of advoc advocacy and they're just in it for themselves and they want to see what's a chamber done for me. But can you speak to that how maybe there at your chamber you're able to express the value and the the reasoning for advocacy to your general membership?
06:26.926 Mirinda Rothrock
You know, it's it is a tricky subject. So I encourage chambers throughout to be able to look, you know, locally. There's obviously getting involved with, you know, their county board or their city government, perhaps village government, different different alignments there. But I think, you know, they can always survey chamber membership. I think it's important if there's a topic of interest, whether that's a a tax increase, a property tax increase. If that's something local, they're looking to raise their levies. Perhaps, you know, the chamber can survey their members, get some input, get some statistics. Having good data to back up your stance or your position from a chamber is is just crucial. So recently here within the state of Illinois, there was a minimum wage increase. Our chamber here locally surveyed our membership, we asked them, is this something you're in favor of? Is this something you can live with? And we got a really good response. Over 80% of our our survey respondents surveyed that they did not want that increase. We were able to use that data, use the number of members who responded. We were able to join forces with other regional chambers and have a bigger, larger voice. So not only did I have a local voice, I had a regional voice, and we really got the attention of our local legislators. So it was really key and vital. And so we also allowed our members throughout this survey to say, hey, why? What would this mean to your business? Some of them said, Hey, with the with this minimum wage increase, it raises the the cost of me to do business. It may put me out of business. Someone said that it would raise their their ability to do business by thirty thousand dollars and it wasn't feasible for them to be able to to do. We were able to use those comments, the that exact verbiage coming from our members, feed that to our legislators, and then lo and behold on the Senate floor we had our our state senator reading comments from Decatur and Macon County what real business owners were saying about this
08:45.546 Mirinda Rothrock
increase. And so that was really important for our membership to know that we were able to collectively both on just our chamber membership but on a regional voice and we had a larger voice within our state.
09:00.694 Brandon Burton
Yeah, that's great. So I I know there's not always a situation such as minimum wage increases going on or things quite as political. do you maybe have any other examples of how advocacy there at your chamber has been a vital element to how you've gone about with your messaging to your chamber members?
09:26.668 Mirinda Rothrock
We've had we've we've done more on a on a state level than than we have local. We did have a utility tax rate that our that our city was looking to increase and you know being an advocate for membership, you know, it it had the city come to us, ask us, some of the their council members called and said, Hey, we we're we're looking to generate more revenue. our pensions with our fire and our police continue to increase. We're looking at different revenue avenues and we know that, you know, we have some of the lowest utility rates in the in the state. So, you know, what what would be the chambers position? And so I think that them coming to us, them kinda asking us about that, it it showed that we we are certainly active and our voice was wanted and needed. And, you know, because of that, we were against an any kind of a a tax increase on our businesses. that didn't come to fruition.
10:33.142 Brandon Burton
Great example. Yeah, you had mentioned earlier that aligning your programming with your advocacy is vital. What makes it so vital in your community to align your programming with your advocacy efforts?
10:49.58 Mirinda Rothrock
So I can I can go ahead and and use the minimum wage example and say that, you know, now we have a graduated increase in our minimum wage. Many of our businesses, our business owners, managers, CEOs, they're so busy in the day to day operations of their business, they really truly don't have the time to monitor when are these increases gonna happen. And and some of them are incremental. Come January one, there's going to be an incremental increase. Come July one, there's going to be another increase. And then the every year after that, there'll be an increase for the next five to seven years. So, you know, how do we help educate? What do we, you know, w how do we help our businesses remember that this is coming their way as they're making their budgets, as they're planning their inventory, as they're looking to hire? providing new services. How do we help our businesses grow and yet keep them knowledgeable about what's heading down down the pathway? So not only was minimum wage increased this past year, but there were other, several other mandates within the state of Illinois that happened. There will have to be some sexual harassment training come for every single employee within the state of Illinois. So We're looking at aligning our programs. We've already brought in a lawyer from the Chicago area, came down and helped educate on the new laws that were recently passed. Recreational marijuana, the minimum wage increase, the sexual harassment training and and varied other laws and and regulations that are gonna be happening. So we kind of brought in an expert to kind of help educate our members. We had over a hundred of our chamber members show up for this program. Because of that, we've aligned what we've advocated for, and maybe the outcome isn't always a win for us or a win for the chamber, but we've certainly brought the issue to the attention of our membership. And now our membership is being educated and we're bringing experts in. And yes, we have to charge for that because we're having to pay for the speaker or if it's a lunch and learn you're paying for for the meal. So you have to kind of cover your cost in that regard.
13:09.612 Mirinda Rothrock
But for the most part, you know, you're educating and you're bringing in members and the questions that they ask, they learn from one another. That becomes a huge, huge value for chamber membership.
13:21.67 Brandon Burton
Absolutely. I love with that example to be able to point directly and say, you know, our advocacy efforts around the minimum wage increase were so focused. And then now that there is kind of an outcome from that, you're able to kind of leverage or, you know, go back to the actual programming that you're providing to your members and say, This is how it's going to affect you. And one of the key things you mentioned is that they're able to learn from each other too. Instead of just coming and having, you know, the the chamber or speaker, whoever you have coming in, speak to them. They're able to learn from each other through that networking and ideas and things that are working well for other businesses to see how they can be applied to their own. Are there any of the programming specifically with the minimum wage increase that you guys have already started to roll out, or are those programs still being developed or where are you guys at in that point?
14:16.888 Mirinda Rothrock
Well, we we've kind of feel like we've addressed the minimum wage you know, the outcome we were against and it got passed and so now here we are. So now our goal is to just educate them, you know, in the next thirty days, you know, give give that heads up, that warning, don't forget the minimum wage increase of, you know, seventy five cents starts on January one and come July one, you know, kind of middle of the year. Don't forget we're gonna have a minimum wage increase. So it's it's we're i i we we've sought their opinion, they know we fought on their behalf, they know that we advocated on their behalf. now we're trying to help continue to educate them and be that resource and that reminder that this is coming down, this is this is happening and and we're trying to help you be better prepared. So so that's one issue and as I say, but then we've we're coming up with doing some you know, sexual harassment training. So, you know, with that, if every business and every employee has to prove that they have had some type of sexual harassment training, the chamber can be a great resource in our community to making sure that happens. We can make sure that we bring in the right experts, the right people and get that training right here in town so they don't have to go outside of town.
15:39.282 Brandon Burton
I like that as you align your programming with the advocacy that it's a reminder of how the chamber is standing up for the business community. Every time that there's a new program or those reminders that you're sending out, it's like kind of that subliminal, yeah, the chamber stood up for us on this. It may not have turned out the way that you that they wanted, but you took a stance, on a regional level, taking it to the state. I mean it it's just a a little reminder each time of of what the chamber's doing to work for the businesses. And I think that is important and vital, like you had said, of of making that alignment between the programming and advocacy. Now along along those topics, are there other things that come to mind that you'd wanted to share as far as advocacy and programming are concerned?
16:29.166 Mirinda Rothrock
You know, I think programming is something that I we always know that we need to provide that for our chamber membership, but so many times I find and and as I was new to the industry, the chamber world, I found myself involved in so many events. We, you know, we do this event and we go to this event. And we need to stop and and think a lot of times, and and I'm sure so many of your listeners have heard this, I don't have the time to attend your events. Therefore my my membership value, I'm not getting anything from it. And so I think that really focusing on programming, turning that around, and we all need nondues revenue, that's that's a given, right? Because we can't all survive just on membership alone. So we know we need events and we know we need programming But I think shifting your focus is where we're at here at our chamber, shifting shifting that focus from event driven revenue and value for members to more of that programming and training and creating that kind of revenue stream in and aligning with your advocacy. It just really clicks and it makes good sense and it's something that your chamber membership can really rally around. They're not the only business in town that needs this type of help. They all do.
17:58.516 Brandon Burton
I totally agree. I mean, the chamber should be that go to resource to be able to get information and to learn how to do better business. And it is hard for a business owner or representative of a business to find time to come to just another luncheon, you know, if you're just gonna come and listen to a nice speaker or whatever. I mean, they're they're great, don't get me wrong. But when you can have a direct program that's gonna provide training and information that's critical to the success of that business, they're gonna be able to find time to do that if it means it's gonna have a direct effect. So I think you're you're absolutely right in making that shift. It is so important.
18:40.056 Mirinda Rothrock
W I think too when you when you start the programming and you kinda align with the issues that are happening within your state, within your region, I think when you start, you know, bringing in maybe a broad brush of, you know, new enacted laws or or something new, it's interesting how things kind of morph into the next realm and the next realm and the next program. So as I mentioned, we brought in an expert, a lawyer from Chicago area, brought them in kind of downstate and talked about this broad brush of all of these new laws that were enacted and now how do businesses implement them? And you know, while we talked about so many different new laws and and new regulations and and great questions from our chamber members and they're learning from each other and you know, hey. after this program, you know, after this session, can can I get your business card? I really want to learn more about what you're doing in your business because I think I can learn from you. So we heard a lot of that. But what also morphed out of that was the need for a handbook. It was interesting to know that we hit a spot in, hey, with these new laws, now you need to update your handbook. And it allowed us to hear that And so many of the questions kind of aligned around the handbook. Our next program after the the the law, we brought in an expert from SHERM, our local SHERM chapter, Society for Human Resource Management. And so we brought in an expert there that talked about what are the key elements that you need in a handbook. While we didn't write the the chamber members handbook, we certainly provided them with value. So that they knew what should be in their handbook. So from one program led to a no other program, which now leads us to to doing some sexual harassment training. So all of this morphed out of aligning with our with with state legislature legislature and aligning with what our members said and then bringing in those key pieces and generating that advocacy and alignment with programs. It's just been really key to our our success.
20:58.272 Brandon Burton
I love that. And it goes back to having that good data as you listen to the feedback of your members, it's providing that data to create those future programs. And the members, like you mentioned, are being able to leverage being at these programming events to be able to it used to be we're gonna have a networking event, come and share your business cards and your elevator pitch. Well, now if you come with a def a definitive purpose of coming to learn how you can better your business, and by the way. you're gonna have some other chamber owner or business owners there at this at this function that you can make those connections with. So that no longer becomes that primary focus of coming to network, but you're able to create deeper networks, I believe, with people that are going through similar issues or similar type of businesses that can really help each other out based around these different programs.
21:52.142 Mirinda Rothrock
And the programs really lend themselves to different levels in a business. So, you know, obviously the CEO isn't going to come to the handbook program. However, they're going to send their HR representative or they're going to send their finance person, their operations person to come to that. And if you have a good quality program and they bring back all kinds of information, that CEO now says, Hey, I haven't been to a chamber event, but my finance and operations director went to that handbook and we received so much value from that. Yes, my chamber membership is worth it.
22:33.952 Brandon Burton
Yep. And how many before really diving into that in the past, how many chamber members would not really be able to pinpoint let me let me back up. How many of the chamber members, their employees would even recognize their chamber members until you start implementing these programs where they're they all of a sudden become invited because of their job role? They it's vital for that success of the business for that individual employee to be there.
23:07.298 Mirinda Rothrock
And I think that's where sometimes we as chamber folks we get ourselves where we want to be everything to everybody. And, you know, we certainly are trying to provide that value. And this is a great way your programming and how it fits within that business organization at all different levels. That programming is so key. And now you've got your finance operations director. When they see the invoice come through for chamber membership, it's Again, it's that light bulb going off, going, hey, I went to that handbook program. I went to that, you know, new laws that were enacted. I went to sexual harassment training. Yes, we need to get this paid. CEO, here we go. Initial this invoice. Let's get this processed. Our chamber's providing incredible value to us.
23:57.038 Brandon Burton
Absolutely. They see that value and it doesn't become a question to the CEO of whether or not we renew. It's here it is, sign off because there's definite value.
24:06.222 Mirinda Rothrock
Exactly. I've networked, I've learned more. I learned more what our chamber's doing. something that we do that I'd like to share is we have a a little brochure that we call Save the Dates. It's an eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper. We cut it right down the middle and we call it our Save the Dates. And everything that we've got planned from ribbon cuttings, business after hours, programming, our traditional events. You know, we try to put what's coming up in the next week or two front and back a lot of times and we hand that out as well at all of our programs, all of our events, and so folks know what their chamber is up to. They know what we're what's coming up next, they can get that on their calendars, and they see the the value in the programming, and it's not just about coming to an event, it's about attending and becoming educated on an advocacy issue.
25:01.898 Brandon Burton
Right. So you're doing those save the dates for each month? Is that how that works?
25:07.072 Mirinda Rothrock
We d well, because we are such an active chamber, we have to do it about sometimes two and three times a month because we have so many different events listed.
25:17.644 Brandon Burton
Wow. It's a great idea though. Keeps it in front of them. And I know a a lot of times, you know, the chamber member gets an email and it gets buried with hundreds of other emails. And I I think we lose the value of having just that piece of paper in our hand that reminds us to put something on the calendar or show up somewhere. So that that's great. so Miranda, I know we need to kind of start wrapping things up here a little bit. So I wanted to ask you from
25:22.286 Mirinda Rothrock
It really does.
25:48.162 Brandon Burton
The discussion that we've had today, what is one action item that listeners can do to maybe level up their chamber?
25:59.286 Mirinda Rothrock
On the advocacy side, I would say one easy thing that you can do, show up at your next village or city council meeting. If you haven't been attending and all of a sudden you you're there, it's funny. That all the city council or all your aldermen are going, why is the chamber exec here? Why they got why is somebody from the chamber here? What's going on? What's going on? Yeah, right? And and and I Lightly said nothing. I'm I'm trying to better understand the community in which we all live and operate. And so now I'm pretty regular. Isn't it a little bit of extra work and an extra bit of time? Yes. Do I make every meeting? No. But it certainly shows our interest, a chamber of commerce interest in city government. And city government then looks at you as a resource. How do we partner on making our community and our city better? How do we do that? And if you don't have a a a big city council meeting, go to the counc the county level. Whatever you have in your community, be active in, be a participant of. It really is easy. You don't have to speak. You don't have to have a canned speech. You're just showing up. You're just trying to learn what's going on in our community.
27:24.298 Brandon Burton
I love that. You have to be present. You have to be at the table. That's awesome. Yeah, the this question I asked to every guest that I have on on the podcast is it regarding the future of chambers. And I think there at the Decatur Regional Chamber, you're kind of creating the future for your chamber. But as we look to the future, how do you see Chambers of Commerce and their purpose going forward?
27:52.568 Mirinda Rothrock
I think that the chamber of commerce of old, which I think we all know, is certainly not where we're at today. So I think that chambers of commerce have to continually reinvent themselves, continually be top of mind. This is a changing world. Technology has changed so very much where chambers of commerce used to be the end all be all with business knowledge and business connections, you know, everything's at the you know, the touch of Google. So now we need to become really vital and partners in our chamber members business. We need to show them you're not in it alone. We're here, we're here providing you resources and connections. And I think as we look to the chambers of the future, I think we'll look at ourselves as ever evolving.
28:43.816 Brandon Burton
I love that. Great answer. Ever evolving. You got to keep collecting that data and keep changing. so Mirinda, as people listen to this episode and have questions about how you're doing things there at the Decatur Regional Chamber, how might somebody get in contact with you to maybe bounce some ideas off you or see how you're doing things there?
29:08.12 Mirinda Rothrock
You know, I probably work best with email like most folks, so I I would welcome an email at Merinda spelled M-I-R-I-N-D-A dot Rothrock R O T H R O C K at the Caterchamber dot com. Would welcome any other thoughts and ideas. Maybe someone here thought, well that's kind of good, but I I do something even better. Shoot me your ideas. Let's let's make that connection.
29:36.192 Brandon Burton
I love that idea. Make this interactive. So
29:40.506 Mirinda Rothrock
Absolutely, because n no one knows everything, right?
29:44.366 Brandon Burton
That's right. Absolutely. And we'll get your contact information on the show notes page for this episode, which will be found at Chamberchat Podcast dot com slash episode forty eight. But Mirinda, I just wanted to thank you so much for spending time with me today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I think you provided a lot of value for those that are listening and hopefully some things that people will start implementing back at their chambers. Thanks a lot.
30:10.712 Mirinda Rothrock
Thank you, Brandon.
30:13.952 Brandon Burton
If you are a Chamber professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple Podcasts, 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.

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

Episode 47 — Integrating TRACTION Into Your Strategic Plan with Charlie Moore
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Charlie Moore
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.83 Brandon Burton
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.
00:18.102 Brandon Burton
Two pet snakes.
00:24.428 Brandon Burton
Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. This is episode 47, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. Our guest today is Charlie Moore, who's the president and CEO of the McLean County Chamber of Commerce in Illinois. And he's a focus leader for the continuing advancement of business in his community. He's an Illinois native, and he's devoted his career to promoting local commerce, advocating for small business, creating relevant programs, and establishing relationships for business success. Before joining the McLean County Chamber of Commerce in 2008, he was executive director of the East Peoria Chamber of Commerce and vice president of programs for the Northwest and Schomburg Association. of Commerce and Industry. A graduate of Bradley University, more holds an IOM designation from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Colorado College, and the designations of both ACE from Illinois Association Chamber of Commerce Executives and CCE from the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives Association. He married his high school sweetheart, Colleen, in 1998, and they have two boys, Andrew and Adam. They live in Bloomington and are part of the Tri Valley community. In his spare time, he enjoys working outside, travel, hitting the trail, and coaching football. Today, Charlie will be visiting with us about integrating traction into your strategic plan and for your members. And we'll get right into that as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsor. Every chamber is looking for new ways to increase their nondues revenue. Has your chamber found a good affinity program? I have a great affinity program to offer your chamber that will continue to increase in revenue year after year. I want to introduce you to Swipe It for all of your credit card processing needs. Swipe It has a unique affinity program that 1. lowers your credit card processing fees at the chamber, 2 helps your chamber members be more profitable, and 3 provides recurring non-dues revenue to your chamber. To learn more,
02:52.824 Brandon Burton
please visit chamberchatpodcast dot com slash C C for credit card. Again, Chamberchatpodcast.com slash C C and get swiping with swipe it. All right, Charlie, we are back. Please say hello to the Chamber Chat Podcast audience. And if you would share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
03:17.452 Charlie Moore
Hey, well it's a pleasure to be here today. Thanks, Brandon, for the opportunity to be part of your podcast. I've been looking forward to this, to talk a little bit about, you know, my few years in the chamber industry. And and I think that, you know, I've heard some of your your podcasts, and there's certainly people over the gamut who've been with the chamber for six months or forty years and I've been have been in the chamber business for probably about twenty-five. And I you know, when I stop to think about that, I almost hate to say it out loud. it doesn't seem like it's been that long, but but clearly it has. You know, I I had kind of the unique opportunity to start the business when I was going on on my undergraduate. I worked for an organization that that encompassed the Peoria area chamber of commerce. And that was where I got I guess you'd say my myself started integrating into what the Chamber of Commerce could offer and what its purpose and core values were for Peoria at that point in time. And that took me for like I said, about the next twenty-five years as I forged forward. And and so that's something that's a little bit unique about me that I've had, you know, that kind of that I joke when I hire people about, you know, no one goes to college to work at a chamber of commerce. I did, in fact, because I started working there while I was in college and and have never got out since. So no great opportunity and and so you know, I've been doing this for a while, but I think it's it's fun because you know, while I've had the opportunity to to learn. and the opportunity to lead, I've also find myself you know, always under continuous improvement. So I think that that's why you'll find me heavily engaged with ACCE, whether it's their education attainment division or we're I'm fortunate to serve on the Chamber of the Year judging committee for ACCE. We're fortunate to have won the ACCE Chamber of the Year a few years ago as well as the Illinois Chamber of the Year a few years ago. So you know it's a a pleasure to hear what other people are doing and And I'm also involved with the US Chamber's Midwest Institute Board of Regents. that's a new role for me and I look forward to to engaging there. So yeah, I guess something that's unique about me is that I I I literally started working the the chamber profession when I was in college and twenty five years later I'm still at it.
05:24.172 Brandon Burton
That's great. You know, time flies when you're having fun. And you mentioned how nobody goes to school to work in the chamber industry. And it just so happens that my the previous interview I just did was with Roy Williams, the Oklahoma City Chamber. And he was making the same comment, but he actually went to school to work the chamber and economic development industry. And for so many people it happens by accident, but kind of coincidence it that two of these interviews in a row were very much on purpose that's what you're doing. So that's awesome.
05:53.934 Charlie Moore
And it's it's you didn't you wouldn't do it if you didn't have a passion for it. And I think that's you know, I joke with a number of people that I've been to more before and after hours and anyone should have to count my tenure in in the chamber industry. but it is, it's it's the work that we are afforded the opportunity to do, the people we get to work with, the results that we get to change and drive. it's it's truly, you know, it's it's a it's a a blessing and an opportunity. some days I would tell you it's a curse. to be able to have a position like this and work for a chamber and and you know I think we'll talk later about you know how do we continue to evolve and stay relevant with our programs of work from what we know to be true from twenty five years till where we're gonna be in another twenty five years.
06:37.518 Brandon Burton
That's right. Very good. Well, can you give us a little bit of background about the McLean County chambers? Just kind of the size and location, kind of give us a a better idea so we can all relate to to your chamber a little bit better.
06:49.004 Charlie Moore
You bet. So the title of our organization is McLean County, but it's Bloomington and Normal, Illinois. And so we're a countywide organization with seventeen subcommunities that we're a part of as well. But Bloomington Normal are the primary main population base of where we serve our membership. So we're over a hundred years old, and I like to joke with people and say that, you know, everyone's heard about the Great Chicago Fire. Well, we started because of the great Bloomington Fire in nineteen one, and that's when our organization started, and it's had a myriad of names. And purposes throughout its history. but today we have, you know, north of a thousand members, got a about a 1.2 million dollar budget. we are fortunate to have nine members on our team here. So we're not a large chamber, but we're not a small chamber. and then you know, we've got a lot of different things going on that are gonna be similar to most of your your audience as far as how our board makeup is, our divisions, our subsidiaries. we have been blessed for about twenty-two years here to have an insurance division of our chamber. that was a great benefit for members until the Affordable Care Act, which basically neutered a lot of what our work was in in that particular program. But we also, you know, have a strong and thriving political action committee, as well as a newly formed subsidiary called Compact, which is our true focused efforts on workforce development and talent pipeline. So, you know, we've been been a longstanding organization. We continue to grow. we are in definitely in central Illinois where we have three interstates that intersect here. We have rail service, we have air service. we're, you know, forty miles from Piore with barge service. so agriculture really is our number one industry. And so getting product out of McLean County is fairly easy with all the different modes of transportation I just talked about. So we're fairly well set and we've been you know fortunate to be in I'd say somewhat of a recession proof type of industry, not only with agriculture, but we're also the home of State Farms headquarters here in Bloomington, Illinois. also with healthcare and education. So while a number of communities, you know, over the last decade, you know, seven, eight years ago specifically, started to see a downturn in their economies. we were insulated. You know, that's not to say that we haven't had our our share of issues over the last several years, but we didn't see some of the pain that a lot of communities did over the last decade. And I will tell you that there's some great things going on right now that I think lead us for an opportunity for a culture change in blooming to normal.
09:12.43 Charlie Moore
not just organizationally but community wide that will shift maybe some of our industry dynamic as well. So again, right kind of in the crux of the central Illinois, I heard Norma Lansing say she was central Illinois. I'm gonna challenge you that Norma. No. You know, w but and so we are surrounded by a lot of great communities as well. But that's just a brief overview about where we are here.
09:33.774 Brandon Burton
All right. Very good. sounds like you've got a lot of good good things going on there and a long rich history. So that's awesome. So our topic for kind of our conversation today, as I I mentioned in the introduction, is going to be around integrating traction into your strategic plan and for your members. So Charlie, why don't you kind of take the ball and run with that? Explain to us what traction is and and what direction you want to go with that.
10:02.296 Charlie Moore
Sure. So I I think this is something that every chamber should find relevant, quite frankly, whether you're a one person shop or you're a hundred person shop. And I know that over the last year or so there's been a lot more discussion in the chamber industry about traction. but come to find out, you know, it's it's you know almost a decade old as far as the program itself. And businesses who have been using it and those that I have done some research in our community and using it are finding dramatic results for the benefit of a company. And so what brought us to traction was the fact that You know, our organization has been successful in a very long for a very long time. We've grown, we've done good things, but understanding that as we need to evolve what our program of work looks like and what we're responsible for and what we take ownership of, you know, you you start to play into space of a lot of other entities. And so what is it that is our role and responsibility in comparison to the Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Economic Development Council, the Regional Planning Commission? How do you partner with the airport or with the air transit authority? And so, you know, several years ago, a number of us had a chance to partner and create a regional economic development strategy that we refer to as the B in Advantage. And so we had a lot of great work going in that direction, but just in the last year and a half or two, found ourselves as an organization, you know, I would say we were subscribing to the if not us then who motto. And I don't know, you know, looking back that that was the best thing for us because we became an inch deep and mile wide in some particular areas. And so we needed to refocus. While we had a strategic plan, we needed to tighten our belt. We need to have additional accountability. We needed to have the right people engaged. And I learned about traction through ACCE when I read one of their quarterly newsletters and was looking at an article written by Jane Clark from the West Coast Chamber in Michigan. And Jane has been doing work with traction for about the last four years and doing a little more research. There are several chambers that have started in the last year and a half or two. one here in Illinois, the Quad City Chamber, but then a number of others across the nation. And so learning more about this, really trying to understand what it is. And so traction kind of pulls away from our traditional strategic planning approach. So any chamber exec that's listening to this podcast, you know that you you pull your board together for a retreat, you provide membership feedback that they review.
12:21.794 Charlie Moore
You come up with your strategic plan, program of work, you look at your tactics and your metrics and your KPIs. and at the end of the day, if you just do a one day planning retreat, your next three years program of work is based off the mood your board members were in that day. And so we need to be much more structured and much more strategic about what kind of work we're doing because my team, my staff, you know, are involved with the work that we do every day along with talking with our members every day. And so what looking at traction did for us was how do we build our lane? You know, you hear sometimes the whole the phrase stay in your own lane. We want to build our lane. We don't want to stay in it. We want to build it. And then we'll invite people to join us. but we want to have a very clear path of the direction that we're going. And so what traction does, it has a model called the entrepreneurial operating system, the EOS. And so EOS helps us look at a number of things. It starts off by really raising up how important your core values are. And I mean, you can read good to great and you know every other great organizational development book that's out there. but you know, we've had core values forever here, but we've never really used them to scrub our program of work andor our people. And so looking at our core values and how does that really dictate who we want to sit at the table from a staff perspective, from a board perspective, how does that jive with what our overarching mission, vision, and and strategies look like? And so we start there. And then you go a little bit further and you start looking at, all right, so what's the accountability model? Because again, as chambers, when I talked about being an inch deep and mile wide, some things you didn't necessarily hold the accountability to where you'd like it to be because well, we'll put our focus over here for this week or this month or this year, rather than staying true to what you're trying to accomplish and looking at your one, three, five, and ten year goals. And so really looking at how do we have that accountability model for our staff? not only by creating, you know, a metrics through a scorecard, but also making sure that they get it, that they want it, and that they have a capacity to do it. And so then you take it a little bit further and you look at your volunteer leadership and do they understand your core values? Do they understand, you know, what we're looking at for a one, three, five, and ten year, the 10 year being a BHEG, your big hairy, audacious goal. And then do they get it, do they want it? And do they have a capacity to do it? And so you build this vision traction organizer, which we are still in the process of doing.
14:44.224 Charlie Moore
I'm only about four months into this process of of legitimately trying to build our plan, of which you know, in February, so several months from now, we'll actually roll this plan out to our board. So we'll present the strategic plan and process to our board for them to chew on once we've presented it. And they can provide input and feedback, and of course we can make adjustments. But the plan isn't being written by them. The plan is being written by staff who have the information, who do this every day, who understand. Who gets it, who wants it who has the capacity to do it, who understands the metrics that we're looking to accomplish, who continually ask, why are we doing this and to what end? So what's the end result look like that matters towards our short-term or long-term strategy and plan? and so at the at the end of it, in February, hopefully we will have a an approved strategy that will be you know looked at every 90 days by staff, every year by staff, we'll report back to the board, we'll have very public benchmarking. where we'll be showing our store our scorecard and how we're making progress, tracking history, which we've not done a great job in the past, really paying attention to what are trends that we should be watching organizationally. and so once we have this plan complete, you know, then there's an ongoing process of how you continue to keep traction going. And so I would submit that this is probably one of the best ways of taking information that you and I would we already know. It's not new, but it's how it's packaged and put together. that really holds your team accountable for the work that they're doing and really make sure that you're focused, that you're on target, and that what you do is intentional and not accidental. And that you're not an inch deep and mile wide, but you're very structured and focused to the work that you're being done. So when you report back to your investors or report back to your members, you can be very clear how you did, what you did, why you did it, and to what end. So I think that's a it's a great it's a great book for every chamber to read. It's a it might not be the best practice for every chamber, but I think There are components of it from implementation that would be good to look at as well. But more importantly, I want to transition for just a minute, not only to the chambers program of work, but for our members, for those that we serve. Right. So our mission statement starts to serve our members, dot dot dot. And so traction provides a floor plan for a business that if they follow it and they follow it true, that everyone I know who've utilized it have watched steep increases not only in their productivity, but in their profitability.
17:10.111 Charlie Moore
And so we'll start looking at facilitated and unfacilitated groups with our members to help them understand what this process looks like, not to sell them on it, but to show them that if they truly want to grow their business, this is something that has measurable results for for people who are entrepreneurs and business owners in our backyard already. But how we as an organization are adapting it to make it work for our organization, which is representing their organizations. So I think that if something to take away, if it's not for your organization. It's a process and a strategy that you can implement for your members who want to grow their business. It gives them some ideas of how they can intentionally grow and stay on target and on task and watch the results happen.
17:49.984 Brandon Burton
I like the whole idea about being strategic and intentional and focused and that it's not your your board that's writing your strategic plan, but it's actually a staff member who knows the the ins and outs, the days day to day operations. And I assume when you present that strategic plan to the board, you have data that you're you're presenting with it to back up the the direction that you're wanting to go with that. am I correct in that assumption with how you would present that?
18:18.114 Charlie Moore
Absolutely. So I mean, we we've started already, while we won't present until February, we've already started and developed what our scorecard looks like and what we're measuring. And so as we go forward, you know what we measure may change because what we think is important today as we forge forward and really take a look at what our long-term goals are going to be. There might be some other things that we've we've not thought about that we need to we need so we need to be we need to have the ability to pivot, if you will, and make sure that we can adjust the plan. So this isn't a long-term strategy. the long-term goals might be there, but how we do the work we do could be looked at every 90 days with different goals and outcomes. And so the numbers that we have, the research that we do, the the metrics that we keep and retain will be presented to our board. But that'll also be kind of a starting ground. So as we really take a look at consistency over the you know the next year, two years, three years, we can go back and really identify trend, what's worked, what hasn't worked, what we should do differently, and what we should quite frankly get rid of. 'Cause chambers are quite notorious for adding more and more to their program of work, but not taking anything away. and so therefore that goes back to that capacity to do it, right? What I talked about before. So you've got to know it, you've got to want it, you've got to have the capacity to do it. Well, if we keep adding more and we're not taking any away, then we're in in the long run gonna be that inch deep a mile wide again. So we have to understand to keep our program of work relevant, what do we have to scrub? And so all of those numbers will be looked at from staff weekly. We actually get together on Friday afternoons to review those numbers. And then we'll present to the board quarterly once we have that up and running. But then the numbers will actually be available, but not there yet. We're completely redoing our website. But when the website is up, we'll have that scorecard be very public. So any of our members or anyone could hop online and see, you know, where are they at with X, Y, or Z, whether it growth of membership, revenue, sponsorship, you know, community development initiatives, things that have to do with advancement of of education, our workforce development initiatives, things like that. So it'll all be very open and transparent.
20:13.644 Brandon Burton
Very good. I think it's so important. You you mentioned a couple of times about reevaluating or or looking at those numbers every 90 days. And I think with just how fast paced and and how quickly change can happen today, that it's important to even though you have a five year plan, to look at it every 90 days, because there may be some adjustments that you need to make, you know, well before that five years to meet a a a better, maybe a a more efficient trajectory. Rather than sticking to what you decided five years ago, you know, as you're you know, year four, year five into it. I just think things can change so quickly. It's important to keep a pulse on it and and pivot where you need to. So I think that that's great. so y I mean you've covered a lot of information here.
21:02.414 Charlie Moore
Sorry, I do think a little fast, so
21:05.772 Brandon Burton
No, that that's okay. That's great. I'm thinking for the for the individual, for the chamber professional, the the the chamber that wants to integrate traction into their into their chamber, their strategic plan and with their members, what what would be one action item you would give them to be able to to get started and to to help elevate their chamber to the next level?
21:29.432 Charlie Moore
Sure, so there's a couple things. The one is, I mean, there's actually a a group that started within ACCE that is a s I'll call it a support system for those who are curious about or starting or have already implemented traction for their strategy and for their program of work. So that that user group already exists. You can also go to the iStore and download the app, the EOS app, where you can read a lot of what I've just told you. Or listen to some, I'll call it some narrative, almost like an audible, on what the the version of traction is and how it all works and comes together. So you can do it that way. You can also go to the traction website where you can see most of the charts that are up there just to get an idea of what it what it entails. But lastly, one of the things I think that we are relying on as an organization is because we are so busy going different directions every day, every week, that's how you know all of us in the chamber industry operate. We have an integrator, if you will, excuse me, an implementer. An implementer. so who that's a consultant who is walking us through a very specific process. And if you if you go on to the traction website, you can take a look at who the implementers are. We actually only have one in our community. Chicagoland, which is about two hours north of us, has several, but their pipelines are so full it's hard to get implementers from from that market. And so we did we are working with the the local individual who's an implementer. That has a very specific process that they follow to walk you through as you build your leadership team. So that's one of the things I would throw out there that's interesting for us. We are nine members strong on a staff. We have four of us that are going to be part of the leadership team. For years and years and years, it's been myself with all the team underneath of me. Now we're building a leadership team of four, and we'll really only have five that are, you know, staff members doing other work to make sure that you know there's we've got very specific focuses on three areas of operation of the organization. And so while I might be at the top as a visionary and and as the CEO, I know that I've got people looking specifically at membership, the numbers of new members and retention and programs and services. I've got someone specifically looking at finance and operations. I have someone specifically looking at the marketing and communications. And so underneath each one of those is then the rest of you know my team who, you know, does the work under each one of those categories. So there's always at least two or three people on the staff outside of myself.
23:53.71 Charlie Moore
who are focused on everything that makes us whole as an organization. And I think for a smaller organization like I am, that's huge because I've been the one that that gets to wake up at two o'clock in the morning and think about how we close the budget gap or what are new more non-dues revenue or what are ways to tighten our belt and cut some expenses. And this brings your team closer to the table, to a seat at the table, to really lend their voice and their expertise to to drive the work that you do. And sometimes some people really want that and sometimes people don't. And I think we know what I'm finding already is that you know there's part of this, you know, process that understands or determines the right people with the right seat. And, you know, we've already identified we had, you know, one member of our team who already self identified that they were the wrong person for that seat. and so we'll continue to go through that process. And I don't know that we have anyone else that way, but I think it helps us all just maintain that focus. So as a someone who's looking to know more, you can get the book, you can have a consult with the ACCE peer group. Myself or I'm sure some of the others would be happy to talk to you individually. You can download the app. There's a lot of information out there. but it's a lot of information. So you might just if you find an implementer, they provide a free 90 minute overview. and so that might be something else. It's just to look at developing a relationship with an implementer and having them do the 90 minute interview just to determine if this is the right process for your organization.
25:15.086 Brandon Burton
That's right. And we'll we'll get those those tips into the show notes page that you just mentioned about the the book, the app, the attraction website, and the ACC support group so they can kind of navigate these waters. but the the show notes page will be found at chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode forty-seven. But Charlie, as we start wrapping things up here, I wanted to ask the question that I ask everybody I have on the show as we Look to the future of chambers of commerce. How do you see the future and and the purpose of chambers going forward?
25:51.318 Charlie Moore
You know, that's a that's a great question. And I will tell you that if someone says that they have the the the answer, it's like a billion dollar answer. Right. So a as we continue to have to, you know, pivot as we take a look at the services that we provide, if we look at the outcomes that we're responsible for, you know, as we look at the next generation of workforce and talent development and understanding skills gaps and what our employers need. And in in company attraction and employee attraction, and community development and quality of place, I would tell you that, you know, the tier dues has been something that's been talked about for a number of years. And we're looking at that model, but I'm also looking more at how is the work that we do really tied to overall community development. And I think a lot of chambers would probably tell you the same thing. Understanding regional strategy. When you heard me talk earlier about the being advantage and, you know, who's doing what with the EDC with the Convention Visitors Bureau, with transit, with airport, with regional planning, you know, we're blessed to have three college or three universities, two universities and one community college in our backyard. So university and education engagement and implementation is is huge for us. And so as we look at who our community partners are, what is it that we need to do to work together? Because Bloomington Normal has been successful for decades because of the recession proof types of industry that we have. However, you know, as as once of a community change from the up-and-coming workforce and you know the baby boomers who are looking to get out of the workforce, what are the what does the community provide them that they would a stay or re-engage upon retirement? Those are some hard questions that we have to figure out and understand how we work together in order to do that. And so we've been blessed in our community to have some new industry move in over the last I I'd say last year. and so with that, how do we how do we identify what the needs of the change of culture that those those businesses could bring to our community? How does that help our culture within our community pivot just a bit and understand do we move away from from banking and insurance to innovation and technology? We are fortunate to have the startup Rivian in our community. Rivian is an electronic truck and SUV.
28:11.32 Charlie Moore
But also heavily focused on autonomous vehicle research. And so it's public knowledge that the last six months they've received about one point five billion of investment from both Ford and from Amazon, and have recently been awarded a hundred thousand vehicle purchase from Amazon for battery operated Amazon delivery vehicles. And so, you know, there's a huge opportunity. We had the Mitsubishi manufacturing in town. And after 30 years, they left North America for manufacturing. And so we had a vacant property. And so there's a long story I won't go into now, but we are blessed to have Rivian here in our backyard now. And the research and technology and innovation that it brings, how do we help address that skill set that they need? But then how do we use that as a culture shift to take a look at other innovation and technology opportunities? We in the last year brought for the first time a Canadian company called Brandt into our community that will be up to about 500 jobs in the next couple of years. with more intended to come. And so again, and those are gonna be not only innovation and technology, but also vocational types of employment, right? So how do we go back to making sure that those who are graduating from high school have that opportunity with vocational training to move right into the workforce at a pay rate that will be family sustainable and you know we'll have them be an integrated part of our community. And then you take all of that and tie it around with how do we look at community development from aesthetics, quality of place, engagement opportunities, entertainment complexes, ways that you can integrate the eighteen to eighty year olds. So that's a lot of things said to your short question, which is that community development and looking at everything that makes up your community is something that I think the chamber's board of directors and you as a leader of your organization need to pay close attention to every day because that's going to be what makes you sustainable.
29:59.18 Brandon Burton
That's right. And I think those partnerships that go along the way. That that's great insight. Yeah. Lots of detail to that answer. So it gives gives some opportunity for people to explore different ways to to stay relevant. So but Charlie, I'd I'd like to thank you for spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. if anybody wanted to get in contact with you about how this implementation of traction is going for you or anything else you have to share with us today, what's the best way for them to To reach out and connect with you.
30:30.04 Charlie Moore
Sure, just Google us. We have a really long web address. McLean M-C-L-E-A-N-C-O chamber for McLean County Chamber.org. So just Google McLean County Chamber or Bloomington, Illinois, and we'll pop up there and you'll find my contact information, you know, on the website. It's just Charlie at McLeanCo Chamber.org. And be happy to talk to you about it. This is the fun stuff, right? So and I look at it, you talk about other ways to be relevant. It's you know. All of us in this business, you know, we've all come up with probably the same ideas at different times throughout our careers. And so rather than creating it new ideas, you know, the best form of RD that we have is to rip off and duplicate what other people are doing really well and put them in your backyard. And so I'm all about how do I build those relations with my peers, you know, who's interested to know what we're doing. We're certainly interested to know what everyone else is doing, to take a look at what could work good for our membership and for our community as we forge forward. And so I would welcome, you know, emails, phone calls, chances to visit. we are blessed to have the folks from the West Coast Chamber from Michigan coming to our office next Monday and Tuesday. So they're gonna come down and share their experiences of traction with my staff, with my board, and then they're also gonna be part of our statewide conference for Illinois, which is gonna be next week. So we're gonna bring them down for a couple days to share all that they've done over the last four or five years with us. So use that opportunity to learn from others, rip off and duplicate and plug it into your own program of work because that's gonna be one of the best tips I would walk away with.
31:57.568 Brandon Burton
Yep. Collaborate on that R and D. That's right. That's awesome. Well, Charlie, thank you so much. I think you provided a lot of value and and things for people to explore. So again, thank you.
32:08.706 Charlie Moore
Thank you, Brandon.
32:11.67 Brandon Burton
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