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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 37 — Professional Growth with Eddie Brown
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Eddie Brown
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.18 Eddie Brown
It was so important for me to find out from professionals in our area. And then since then I've had the opportunity to visit with people like yourself and others throughout the country that that share their experiences and the things that make their chamber or other chambers successful and w that way we don't have to spend time trying to reinvent the wheel and
00:24.524 Brandon Burton
You just heard a preview from our guest today, Eddie Brown from the Sherman Chamber of Commerce. He'll be talking to us today about professional growth. But first, let's cue the intro. 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.
00:51.96 Brandon Burton
Hello, we're here today with episode thirty-seven of Chamber Chat Podcast. I'm 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. Our guest today is Eddie Brown, president and CEO of the Sherman Chamber of Commerce in Texas. born and raised in Dallas, Texas, Eddie attended East Texas State University, which is now Texas AM Commerce. Eddie began his career with Coca-Cola, where he spent 40 years before retiring in 2010. Most of his Coca-Cola career was in management, and at Coca-Cola, Eddie served on many committees, prepared annual budgets, represented Coca-Cola through the Texas and Oklahoma Soft Drink Association. Which allowed him the opportunity to interact with local, state, and national elected officials. This interaction has prepared Eddie to continue legislative work for his chamber. Eddie began his work at the Sherman Chamber by serving on the board of directors and leading the Legislative Relations Committee. When the chamber had a change in leadership and a vacancy in their executive director position, Eddie volunteered to help a few days a week. That was just over eight years ago. Eddie has experienced has experience in management, budgeting, community relations, and a general knowledge of what the chamber did. However, knowing very little about the chamber industry, Eddie has relied on other great chamber professionals in the area as mentors. Eddie and his wife Susan have been married for forty nine years and have three adult children and four grandchildren. Through his experience with Coca-Cola, Eddie has Eddie learned that Coca-Cola is a company that believes in developing their talented people, customer relations, succession planning, goal setting, and putting their people first. Learning how a large company views its employees and provides training for their success is what has qualified Eddie to speak to us today on the topic of professional development on multiple levels.
03:04.652 Brandon Burton
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04:05.088 Brandon Burton
Okay, Eddie, and we're back. Please say hello to the chamber chat audience and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
04:15.294 Eddie Brown
Sure. Well good morning from Sherman, Texas. It's it's a great morning. It's kind of cloudy, so not quite so hot here. And we're excited to be on this this chat and looking forward to if I can help anybody at all, but also really from my standpoint learning from others as well and and from Brandon as we go. I think this is a great opportunity for folks like us that want to get better and better at what we do. I guess a little bit about myself. My wife and I, as Brandon mentioned, have been married really all of our adult life. And I guess about three years ago we found out that she had a brain tumor. had the operation took care of all that and all is is well. But it gave us a refocus on our life as far as our time together, traveling, spending time, making sure we're spending that quality time again with our family. So, We're excited. We've got a family, son and his family that live in Germany and we're excited to get to go visit them in a couple of months and taking some time on a European cruise in the meantime as well. So we're doing our part to to travel as much as we can, see all we can, learn all we can, and just have a great time together. So thank you very much.
05:34.784 Brandon Burton
Yes, that is great. I'm glad you guys are able to take advantage of this the second shot, you know, being able to appreciate life and and get out there and travel and spend time with the family. That is that's wonderful. Right. I've got a a close friend of mine growing up, his wife was just diagnosed with not a brain tumor, but thyroid cancer. So they're they're having that same kind of reality check of you know, making sure they're enjoying every moment and and making the time that they have Yeah, really really means something. So thank you for sharing that. so Eddie, tell us a little bit about the Sherman chamber. So people that may not be, you know, from the area can relate a little bit better to maybe the size of Sherman and you know what what the chamber's all about there.
06:22.37 Eddie Brown
Sure. We're we're about an an hour north of of Dallas and the Fort Worth area, just north of that. We're actually about fifteen miles south of the Texas Oklahoma border and we're in a great place here. The city of Sherman is about forty five thousand. It it's growing about twelve hundred people a year 'cause we're in a area of Texas, North Texas it's really growing. And our chamber size is it it varies right But it's right around five hundred members. we're this year experiencing our largest membership growth that we've probably had in the last fifteen or twenty years, from what I can see. And I believe a lot of our growth is due to our programs, the thoughtful events that we put out in our community, our advocacy and our leadership programs and opportunities that we offer, not only through the chamber but co-working with Austin College, which is a great local university, and our community college and other opportunities like that. as I mentioned, we're in a high growth area, we're capturing capturing our share of that growth. And it I think it's critical for me and for us to make sure that during this time of growth that we're making sure we're knocking doors, greeting people, telling them what we can do, how we can help them, and just making sure we represent the community as our chamber.
07:50.262 Brandon Burton
Well, that sounds like you're doing what a ch what a chamber should be doing. You're being out there and advocating and and helping to introduce these new businesses, you know, with this fast growth in the Sherman area, help introduce them to the chamber and and what you can do for them. So that's terrific. So as I mentioned and kind of alluded to in the as I was introducing you through the the bio there at the beginning, our topic for conversation today is gonna be based around professional growth. And some some different areas of professional growth that hopefully you can dive into a little bit more. But first of all, I know you'd mentioned to me before, know, off the recording that the Sherman Chamber is a hundred and seven years old. So I'm sure there there's been some evolution there at the chamber and and even in the the eight years that you've been there and and your time before that on the board, I'm sure you've seen some change. But I know one of those programs that that you guys have there at the Sherman Chambers, Leadership Sherman. Correct. Can you tell us a little bit about Leadership Sherman and kind of what the evolution of that program has looked like since you've been involved?
09:03.498 Eddie Brown
Sure, sure, happy to. The the program actually started in nineteen eighty, so thirty-nine years ago, with this current class that we've got. However, over the years there have been some classes that years that there were no classes for one reason or another. So this is our thirty-fourth class, even though we started thirty-nine years ago. We Began our leadership program the the year after I got here. We we revised it and started it over again and I believe we had about twelve to fourteen in the class that year. We had a we had a great success. We had a great program, great leaders in our community that participated in that and and now help serve on our leadership alumni committee and our group as we we plan and keep those groups together each and every year. But this year we're at twenty nine in our class. This is our largest class ever. it seems like the last three to four years we have a waiting list by the time we're ready to put out applications for leadership, Sherman. And each year for the last three to four years we've had between about twenty five to twenty nine now sign up and participate in the program. So we get lots and lots of community support. Our our public education puts people through the program each year, our city, our county, our colleges, community college, university, and many, many of our businesses and small businesses, which is very important that sign up for the program and go through it and Then as a committee and as a chamber, we tweak that program a little bit each year as we listen and learn from other leadership programs in our area what might be working or seem a little bit better. So we'll add to or take away and and and just make try to make the program as much about leadership. we we want to make sure it's not just a field trip, visit one place, go to the next place, go to the next place. But
11:15.778 Eddie Brown
When we are at these locations, whether it's city day, county day, medical day, or legislative trip we do, it's making sure that our leadership class gets exposure to leaders in all of those fields, has an opportunity to listen to them and ask questions what makes them great at what they do, what makes their organization great. And and I think that's been a big plus is just every single year our staff and our committee works very hard to make sure our our program just gets better and better and and make sure it doesn't become stale.
11:50.918 Brandon Burton
I love that. what are maybe some specific examples of some recent improvements that have been made to leadership Sherman just to to keep raising the bar?
12:01.048 Eddie Brown
Sure. We I guess about three years ago we started an orientation with our class. prior to that we had a meeting, but we never did do an orientation. And I I met a a gentleman in the North Texas area that is just fantastic, putting together things like orientations and working with chambers on strategic plans and board retreats and things and He's just taken us to a new level with the full day of orientation now before we start the classes and bonding that that group together, getting them started thinking about their project that their class will do, getting to know one another. And by using him and his knowledge, what I see out of that is the classes seem to to become not only a class, but they become friends. in in a community our size, people many people know one another, but there are people that in their class that they never met before. So it it gives a great opportunity for those folks to become friends, get to know one another, know what each other does, help one another out, and it really shows in the projects that they complete at the end of their year for the for the city or the community. And then I think the other thing that I've seen is our class continues to say stay friends, whether it's through social media, media meetups after the class has graduated and continue to help out in our alumni group. And and that's been a big, big change for us. we did that about three years ago. And then this year with our class, we had the opportunity to add a simulated society training, which we're doing it with our same individual that taught our orientation And I know that's not new to Chambers. I've I've learned that's been around a while, but it'll be brand new for us this year. So I'm very, very excited that we're gonna get to offer the Assembly Society. And it looks like we'll be able to do that in conjunction with our local university as well.
14:11.086 Brandon Burton
Perfect. That is awesome. So as you were giving that that response, it really jumped out to me that leadership is very much about networking too, which you're providing that opportunity with having such a say a large class. I think he said 29 this year, but for these people to really get to know each other, get to know each other's business and become friends, then as they are leaders throughout the community, they're able to have a a list of resources of people they can go to to for support and and some guidance for you know these different connections that they have and needs that they come up with. how important would you say networking is with with building these leaders?
14:54.552 Eddie Brown
you know, tremendously important, much like what you what you were saying. And even outside of leadership over the last three to four years, we've really grown our morning networking group. that's gone from about twenty individuals and some of those are in our leadership class, some of them are are businesses, mostly small business in our community, from probably twenty a week to this week we had sixty five. So it's it's really, really grown. And then this year our staff and our team here added an evening networking event, and and that's grown into the range of 40 to 50 people at an evening network as well. So, well I know networking represents a certain percent of what takes place and the members that you have. they are great, great events for those businesses that participate and get to show other members and people in our community what they have to offer. So it's it's exciting to get to see that. And we're really thrilled that we were able to add the evening networking event this year as well. And we're already booking we're booked up through the end of the year, we're booking for next year now. But again, going back to leadership and and your mention networking, not only do we spend the full day with each other one day a month, but we also have a two day trip that we spend for our legislative day when we go to Austin every spring and We'll get to meet with our state representatives when we're there. We get to meet with folks in our capital and hear from leaders in our in our state about what's going on, what's anticipated. And during that trip, I've had many of our leaders come back and say that was just such a great bonding and networking opportunity that we have with one another, getting to spend a couple of days and getting to know one another even that much better.
16:50.41 Brandon Burton
Yeah. I think whenever you have a shared experience like that, it builds those connections so much stronger, more so than just you know, a morning mixer or or something like that where where everybody's doing their pitch, but you have a a a common bond based around an experience and that's gonna build true friendships and and true network. You know, it's not just what can you do for me, but it's what can we do for each other.
17:13.312 Eddie Brown
Exactly.
17:15.32 Brandon Burton
So Eddie, talk to us a little bit about what you're you what you're doing for your staff and board through professional training.
17:23.119 Eddie Brown
sure. I'm I'm a part of the Texas Chamber of Commerce execs board. I don't think I put that on my bio, but I've been a part of that the last couple of years and will be spending the next three years on that board. And that's been a great opportunity for me before I get to our staff and board to get to meet more and more people in our state chamber industry, see what they do and then take the resources that the TCCE offers for our staff and for our board and and along with that the US chamber programs as well. this year our our office manager completed her CCE training and has her certificate from that and we also started her training with the IOM program. this this past summer and very very excited about what she's having the opportunity to learn there whether it's for succession planning or whether it's just in particular for strengthening our chamber and giving us more opportunities and availabilities to support and help out our membership. But she's picked up many many great things from that many great ideas from other from other chambers, what they're doing. things such as the foundation. we do not currently have a foundation, but this gives us a great opportunity to to begin one in twenty twenty. So that's a great opportunity for her to to learn more and more through all the professional training that's offered through organizations like TCCE, through sh US Chamber. And then j most recently we began to send her through some training for InDesign and for publishing, which will help us not only save some money, but again, it'll give us more opportunities to better serve our membership. Then we have a new employee that began the first of this year and we're excited that we're going to put her in the C C E program as well through this next next spring.
19:44.616 Eddie Brown
So we have that opportunity for staff that we're capturing. And again, that just strengthens us and gives us all those options to help out our community. And then for our board, TCCE also offers board chair training every every fall. And that's a great opportunity for us to share with our board, new incoming board chair, what what ideas other chambers doing build our relationship together and And just make us a much, much better success.
20:18.054 Brandon Burton
That's great. I like how you mentioned with your staff. You know, a lot of times we think professional training for staff is going to be, you know, these the conferences and the chamber focused trainings. But you had mentioned, you know, training for InDesign and, you know, these other platforms that are gonna help serve better serve your chamber members. And I think that is that's a great key to be able to to leverage, you know, the the resources you have there at the chamber. And really become expert in some areas so you can better serve your members. That's terrific. So what how do you go about planning for and budgeting for professional growth?
21:00.992 Eddie Brown
well probably the planning a lot of that comes from finding out what is available, what what is a good training program, leadership training program, particular particularly speaking about staff and board chairs. and by that I mean for example what in our state the TCCE has to offer which provides that that training for our staff, but also allows them the opportunity to learn from other chambers while they're at those events. The I I think the other thing would be as far as determining that, we we sit down as a as a staff, total staff, and discuss those, make sure that it's something that they see as beneficial as well, and a good growth opportunity for them. And then we present that during the budgeting process to our board. And fortunately we've got a great board and great leadership there that sees the the need and the the purpose of that training with our our chamber staff for all of us.
22:09.598 Brandon Burton
So have there ever been times where looking at the budget and planning for, let's say, TCCE where you had to maybe not do something else that you wanted to with the budget to allow for yourself and staff to attend TCC and and get that professional training?
22:27.598 Eddie Brown
I think the answer is yes. you know, there there's always opportunity and expense savings. That's I've learned that over the years that many of us have. So i it depending on the priority that we've got built into some of our expenses and planned for the next year, but quite honestly we we put the training in before we worry about the expenses. we have a good idea what those are gonna be. Obviously there'll be things that'll creep up during the year. I if there are, we've got some reserves that we can pull from and and quite honestly, I'm at the stage in my career if if I needed to pay my way to those things I just pay my way and make sure our staff their their fees and their travel or anything like that are covered by the chamber.
23:16.352 Brandon Burton
Yeah. And I'm I'm sure at this point too with you're you're pretty well invested yourself with TCCE. So that priority in the budget is gonna be higher up than maybe some other chambers that are not as fully invested in their their state conferences or or things like that. But I d I know there are some chambers that say, Yeah, I'd like to go to our state convention, but we just didn't budget for. We don't have the budget and it's just I think it's a matter of priorities and and kind of ranking. Where that needs to be.
23:47.806 Eddie Brown
I I think you're exactly right. And particularly smaller chambers, that that is the case. I I would just indicate that take a good look at that because the the training that you receive is is is so important, much more so than some of the day to day things that we do. It just strengthens your chamber and your community with that kind of training and leadership that you bring back. And so if there's an opportunity and I I think there are on some of these There are grants available through the organization. in some cases, what I've found is there are people in our community that will help sponsor some of these things. So don't be afraid to ask. There may be somebody out there in your community that that will pay the bill.
24:37.314 Brandon Burton
That's a great idea. And I'm gonna go back to a little bit what we talked about around the leadership Sherman and having that shared experience as you attend these state conferences and things like that. And and and I'll even go as far as to say to ACCE and you know, some of these bigger conferences, you're having a shared experience with other chamber professionals as well. So you're you're developing those relationships, you're building your network of people that you can reach out to when you or coming across a a roadblock that you don't know how to get through, you can, you know, reach out to that person you met at at TCCE and say, Hey, Tony, you know, how do you do this? And and get some good feedback that way. So I think it's it's important to have those shared experiences, build those networks and be able to go forward learning from other chamber professionals as well.
25:31.374 Eddie Brown
Brandon, you're you're exactly right. And you know, obviously I didn't have a big chamber background, just just a board member, but it was so important for me to find out from professionals in our area and then since then I've had the opportunity to visit with people like yourself and others throughout the country that that share their experiences and the things that make their chamber or other chambers successful and w that way we don't have to spend time trying to reinvent the wheel and and I go back to our staff members IOM training. She started that this year and to me one of the most exciting things is to see in our case her come back and talk about the people she met from chambers across the country and one of 'em's doing this program and one's doing that program and here's a great idea I learned and you know that's to me at my stage in my career that's the great thing to see is the growth within our our young people in our chamber, again, as well as the chamber board members also.
26:39.822 Brandon Burton
Well, that's really kind of what the goal of this podcast is, is to help share those ideas. I mean, it may not be through having that shared experience with people that you met at a conference or that you're, you know, close friends with, but you know, somebody in Ohio or Kentucky or somewhere can be listening to Eddie Brown on the podcast today and hearing how you're doing things with leadership Sherman or just I know it's not having a leadership program at your chamber is not totally outside the box idea. A lot of chambers do it. But there's little nuances and little things that that you'll say that somebody else will pick up on and say, you know what, I need to make that tweak. I need to see about making these adjustments at our chamber so we can better serve our community and our members and and being able to learn from these other chamber professionals is so key. I are there some examples maybe of of other chamber professionals that you've been able to pick up you know pick things up on I know in the in the bio we talked about as you were getting your feet wet with the chamber that you relied on the help of some other local chamber executives. any specific experiences that stand out to you?
27:54.206 Eddie Brown
sure. I a a number of But initially when I when I started volunteering here at the chamber and and helping out and seeing opportunities and finding out who in the North Texas area, our area was were they professionals and what they did in the chamber industry. I just simply reached out through a phone call or an email and asked if I could come spend a half a day with or or whatever. And from that From doing that with about a half a dozen chambers in this North Texas area, I've begun to learn how to better produce and operate and deal with, for example, our our annual magazine visitor guide member directory that we produce. And through a lot of what I've learned with that going back about seven years ago, we took our annual magazine directory from about five thousand copies a year to where this year we'll produce twenty five thousand copies and distribute them not only throughout our our county and our city, but throughout the state in travel centers and various other ac outlets. And we've also learned to look for other opportunities, whether it be in retail in our community, so that the magazine is not it benefits us as a as a fundraising piece of our business, but More importantly, it benefits our members because their information is is out in the community and people can find out if they need a rooker, electrician, a realtor, or whoever that may be. So that that's probably one example that I can give.
29:35.982 Brandon Burton
Well, and I'll I'll add on to that. I mean, my background is as a a vendor for chambers and the the publishing side. And and you're right on as far as getting that publication out there. It is a fundraiser for the chamber, but being able to serve your members by getting it out there, having it be seen, having the community and and even outside of your immediate community be familiar with the publication. So they get used to seeing it, you know, year after year, you know, issue after issue. And then even from the fundraising side, that's going to make it, you know, better or, you know, just as good or better the next year as far as your the sponsorships and advertising within that publication because these members are seeing the benefit out of it. You know, it's getting out to everyone and they're getting a return on their investment. And we s I've seen a lot of chambers where they look at it strictly as a fundraiser part and they don't have to do anything. You know, they just hand it off to to somebody to do the sales and the publishing and then they've got this nice looking publication that they don't do anything with. And how is that serving your members? Yeah, you gotta get it out there and and really leverage that to to help them out. So I I like hearing that.
30:53.066 Eddie Brown
You're you're absolutely right on with that statement because that was one of the things I learned somehow early on was that that publication was all about our membership. we had an opportunity to make some money on it. and then in turn that money can help us support programs like scholarships for our leadership program for small business in particular. But the the true worth of that that publication is really our membership and how we we represent them and the community and help their businesses grow. And if if we're doing that, then they're happy members, that's for sure.
31:31.726 Brandon Burton
That's right. Well, Eddie, what is maybe one action item that you can give listeners today that they can do to further their journey in their professional growth as as chamber professionals?
31:45.898 Eddie Brown
that you know, I I don't think I've got anything earth shattering. But what I what I will say is and I'm I'm learning, believe me, I'm learning each and every day in this chamber business and I and I love it. But one thing I've I've started doing this summer and we're going to carry it on into next year and and I'm gonna involve our staff in in this as well. And it it's really pretty simple, but it it's a good opportunity for people that listen to this, I think, or a challenge to all of us. And that's that it it's real easy for any of us to sit at our desk. We've got plenty of work to do and plenty of phone calls and plenty of emails to return. However, particularly our membership, it it's so important to me that our membership sees us. And I know they do that at events and and other activities, but we've started a lunch program so that we'll take one of our our members a month and take them to lunch. And and again I'm going to I'm doing that currently, but I'm going to include our staff this next year. We've got a staff of two besides myself, so we're not big, but but to take some of our large, medium and small business members to to lunch and through that use that as an opportunity to be a listening session. Ask them what concerns they have in their business, what things might keep them up at night, what do they see coming up that might be a concern, and then take that opportunity as a chamber in our community to help them out with the resources that we have, whether it's something we can help with or it's just putting them in contact with with a leader in our community. But I I think that's a that's a challenge to me, and I would just offer that up as a good opportunity. opportunity for any chamber to to take and do and that's to listen to our our membership and and have that case to do it one on one like that because it's a lot more meaningful.
33:50.658 Brandon Burton
Yeah. Yeah, I two thoughts came to me as you were saying that. One is you'd mentioned that you're not, you know, a big staff or you know, a big chamber. So but I I see that as a positive that you're able to really take advantage of your size and be able to do these one on one lunches. 'Cause if if you were a huge chamber, you know if you had a dozen staff and you know 3,000 chamber members, you're not going to be able to get around everybody to have these one on one personal conversations to figure out what their needs are and how you can better serve them. But the other thought was that this is totally something unexpected, you know, as a as a member, a chamber member, to have, you know, the chamber president say, Hey, let's go grab lunch. You know, I wanna I wanna hear about you and your business and what's going on. And that's something that's gonna win them over and keep them as a a fan for the long term with the chamber. So great, great advice. now, Eddie, as we look to the future, I ask this question to everybody I have on the show, but as we look to the future, how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose?
35:07.171 Eddie Brown
You know, that's that's a great question. in our case, we're a a standalone chamber. I know there are chambers that also have economic development, some have tourism, some have all the above. So in in our case, we're we're a standalone chamber in our community. We work very, very closely with our city and county and our legislative folks in our in Austin, Texas, and and our our congressional representatives as well. what I see in the future is I obviously with the publications not exactly the best way that that young people in our communities especially going forward will see what our chamber does, what we have to offer is making sure that we're capturing what is going to be best available to them. And maybe it is still a publication but but making sure that our website, our social media is working for our membership. I I think that's critical. I think the other thing is is in this world today we're seeing more of an international community. chambers are gonna be strong. We've been around a hundred and seven years. We'll be around a hundred more years, as all chambers will, if they're run properly and for the right reasons. But I think what we'll see is more international opportunities and Even in smaller communities, I think you'll see as our world shrinks and people are doing business all over the world and involved in organizations all over the world, I don't think it will be odd to at some point see that we may have a member that's in Europe or Asia or somewhere like that, simply because it this may be a great opportunity for them to do business and they would need us as a contact locally.
37:03.67 Brandon Burton
Hey, that would be an opportunity to go to lunch somewhere in Europe, right? Yeah. I I think that's great insight and great view into the future. So that's something we can all look forward to. Eddie, I I appreciate you spending some time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I think you've provided a lot of value for the listeners that are are tuning in.
37:07.926 Eddie Brown
Right.
37:30.144 Brandon Burton
I also want to thank everyone who's out there listening. I'm glad you're here and part of this community. The show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode thirty-seven. And Eddie, where can listeners connect with you if they have any questions about what you discussed today or how you're doing things at the Sherman Chamber?
37:50.616 Eddie Brown
Sure, they can they can reach me anytime at my name is Eddie Brown and I am at eBrown, E B R O W N at ShermanCamber dot us. Our our number here at the office is nine three eight nine three one one eight four. And they can follow us through our website at www.shermanchamber dot us or through our Facebook, social media, Twitter. and LinkedIn and so on. We're I I'm eager to hear from anybody that can help me learn more and more as well. So anything I can do, I'm I'm always happy to help. And I do want to thank you so much, Brandon, for this opportunity to talk about our great chamber, our great community, and really thank you for what you're doing in the chamber industry.
38:42.086 Brandon Burton
Thank you. I appreciate that. It's been a blast, you know, putting on this podcast and being able to talk to great people like you. So I'd I appreciate those kind words.
38:55.02 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 36 — Highlights from 2019 Chamber of the Year Finalist Series
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Solo
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.056 Brandon Burton
We just finished a 12 episodes series highlighting the 2019 ACCE Chamber of the Year finalists. This was a fun series to host as I was able to visit with some of the top leaders in the chamber industry and learn more about what they're doing at their chambers to stand out. In this episode, I wanted to do a recap to pull out some of the most valuable information that was shared throughout the series. But before we get into all this valuable information, we need the intro. 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.
00:45.144 Brandon Burton
Thank you for being here as we jump into episode 36 of Chamber Chat Podcast. For those of you who don't know, I'm Brandon Burton and I'm here to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. First, I wanted to congratulate these 12 chambers for being selected as finalists for Chamber of the Year, and special kudos to the 2019 winners, the Murray-Callaway County Chamber. The Longview Chamber, the Asheville Area Chamber, and Greater Louisville Inc. Great job to each of you and thank you for your example and willingness to share with others in the chamber industry. As I explained at the beginning of this recording, today I'll be pulling out some highlights from our 12-episode Chamber of the Year finalist series. I hope you're able to listen to each of these interviews. If not, you can always go back to the past episodes and get caught up. I wanted to host this interview series since these are the top 12 chambers that ACCE chose to compete for Chamber of the Year for 2019. I myself, I like to learn from others, especially from others who are doing what I want to be doing and who are doing it well. When I decided that I wanted to host this podcast, I started looking to other podcasters who are at the top of their game, like Pat Flynn from the Smart Passive Income Podcast. and John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneurs on Fire. These guys know what they're doing, and I was able to learn a ton from them. It is my hope that these chamber professionals and everyone who I have on as a guest on this podcast will provide great value for you that you can implement at your chamber. One specific way that I'm bringing value to chambers already is through the affinity program that's being offered through my partner Swipe It. Swipit is one of the best credit card processors in the business. They often can reduce your processing fees by up to 40%, which will save your chamber money right away. Swipe It provides a way for your chamber to also earn non-dues revenue by promoting the Swipit services to your member partners as you help them to become more profitable. Some chambers are seeing as much as $5,000 to $7,000 each year in recurring non-dues revenue.
03:12.194 Brandon Burton
To get your free cost savings analysis, you can visit Chamberchatpodcast.com slash C C for credit card, and a representative from Swipe It will let you know how they can best serve your chamber and your member partners. Now, as we went through this series, there was a common thread that I noticed in most of these Chamber of the Year interviews. And that was that many of these chambers have a very strong workforce development initiative. That starts in the school systems, local colleges and universities, and provide a way to fill the needs for the employers in their city by matching these students with prospective careers. I'm sure that many of you have similar programs at your chamber, but I know that there are some tips that you can learn as you listen to how their programs work that might make a light bulb go off in your head as to things that you can improve on. In each of these interviews, I asked For each of them to provide one action item that chambers who are listening can implement to take their chamber up to the next level. I've compiled their answers for you so you can get the very best of what they had to offer all in one episode. First up is Justin Starlin from the Wooster Area Chamber, and he talks about what is your chamber's brand in the community. Yeah, If anything to one action minor item and we've done a number over the years, but I think one action I item would be personally really look at where your brand is in the community and and find out where you are you active. Who are the active players that are making a difference in your community? And truly be without bias, say is our organization a a change agent? Are we in the mix? And find out if we're not in the mix and we're not ones that are at the table when those important decisions are being made, or the you know, they're they're shaping the next step in your community. Why is that? How can we be there? And what imp what steps can we do to to truly implement and and be at the table? I think that bring that'll bring value to you as a as a chamber to say, we need to be here.
05:36.12 Brandon Burton
How do we get there and put a stri a strategy together to make that happen? All right. Great stuff, Justin. next up we have Norma Lansing from the Effingham County Chamber. And she talks about being connected to all of the players that are in your community. Well, I think the most important thing for a the a chamber or maybe any community or countywide organization is just to make sure you're connecting with all the all the people, all the players. in the county and and reaching out to other groups and your education community, your governmental agents agencies and and economic development organizations and really sit down and work together because we're all in the we're all our all all of our goals are to make our counties the best that they can be. And so we we we're stronger when we work together. So that's probably the message that I would have is just encouraging that. collaboration, being being very collaborative, being very open and and honest in in in your functions, the way you do things. I mean open, accessible as is is one of our values of our chamber. All right. And now we have Joe Unterreiner from the Calispel Chamber. He had a lot to offer, a lot of good tips. But The one that really stood out to me is he talks about maximizing the number of reps with each membership. But here's Joe's response. Okay. you know, I've got a a couple thoughts about that. you know, and I I referenced some of that earlier. I think one of the real strengths of a chamber, I think, is you know, it like I said, is just the grassroots of what we bring. So, for example, in that first example of that project, with the highways. Yeah, yeah, we weren't the applicant. you know, that was going to be the city of Calispell, right? And we have nothing to do with constructing highways or any of that. But what, you know, chambers of commerce, you know, like ours and your other listeners have is perhaps the best network of influencers in any community is is going to be the the members of the chambers of commerce. And so one of the things we do is we sign up a new member. in our database, we attempt to just
08:01.53 Brandon Burton
get as many reps listed under that business as possible because that adds to our network and our communications network. So, you know, I think that's one of the real strengths we have as chambers is is, you know, the a a network of owners and managers of businesses in your market. and how and how we cultivate that, how we connect and engage and try to retain those, I think is going to be some of the most important, is some of the most important work we do and and how we enhance that is going to be some of the most important work we do going forward. But also on that project, just as a convener, the nobody's got the the network we have to reach out to all of these businesses for a sign on letter or generate support in a lobbying trip to DC. So I I think that's a real strength. I think the other thing is just our ability as chambers to focus on the top issues of the day and the role that we can play in making things happen in that area. even if we're not the lead organization, we just have tremendous assets to bring in. So I think how we focus on that and bring our collective strength to bear on that is gonna be You know, how we succeed going forward. You know, I I also was I was in on a a recent ACCE webinar that where Dave Atkinson, the CEO of the Kentucky Chamber, spoke and he really I I think has maybe done the best thinking out there about connecting with foundations and 501c3 grants for for chamber work in things that are with a C three purpose. and in fact both of our projects were clearly within a C three purpose of advancing community projects. And and I think that I think Dave is right on track with that that our ability to contribute to that and connect with C three organizations has the potential to offer a a great new source of non-dues revenue for chambers across the country. All right. And
10:20.546 Brandon Burton
next up we have Radonna Hessel from the Great Mind Chamber. And she talks about the importance of listening to your members, but doing so with a leadership role to to help implement that change. So Radonna. You know, over all these years I think it's a matter of listening to what the businesses want. listening to what they don't want. we tend to do things because they've always been done that way. and sometimes we ta have to take that leadership role and And kind of steering the ship in a different course, or strengthen if if we're going to continue what we've always done, let's take that and make it better. I think that you know, everything has its time and its place. And I think it's important for chambers to not just look at what we're doing, you know, today and what we did yesterday, but look at what we want to be doing 10 years from now. You know, if you have something that you're doing and you know. people are bound and determined to keep doing it, then okay, let's make it better. or you might be amazed to find that they're they're willing to let it go and to move on to something different. I think, you know, I think chambers, I'm not one of those that believes chambers will go away. I think the handshake still means a lot. And I think we provide that opportunity. I just think sometimes we have to make sure that we are meeting the needs of of who we have now and planning to meet the needs of who we have in the future. Right. And next we have Ron Bunch from the Bowling Green Area Chamber. And he also talks about having a leadership role in the community, kind of like Rodonna touched on, but let's hear Ron's perspective. I think you know, given the business challenges, the number one challenge that we see is talent. And you know, when you look at the six thousand open jobs for our economy, that represents one point three five billion in economic impact. And so With those kinds of business numbers and market opportunities, if that chamber's not working in the talent arena, there's probably a great opportunity to build a relationship with the business base in an area where they have a critical and immediate need. Secondly, one of the things that's you know works for us is really finding opportunities to shape the direction of the community, really taking a leadership role.
12:45.032 Brandon Burton
versus just putting on a program or event, but really stepping in and and and taking a leadership role. So whether it was raising the money to invest in schools, which we raised it to invest in schools, we didn't raise it for ourselves. Or you know, really I I had my COO operate as the interim president and CEO of the Workforce Development Board when we helped to reshape it for 18 months at no cost to take those leadership opportunities, even if you end up getting criticized at some point so that you can make it better because over time the community will the business community will stay around you and will have that really long term commitment to you because they see you leading. Okay. next up is Kevin Sheeley from the Ocala Marion County Chamber and Economic Partnership. And Kevin just he had it nice and succinct. He just said Barbecue sacred cows. Now he expands on that a little bit. So let's hear Kevin's perspective. I I would say it's o two things. I know you actually want to give two. One, it's okay to barbecue some sacred cows. Yeah. Barbecue's great. Yes. Barbecue's great. It it's time to probably those programs, those initiatives that really don't meet your mission, it's time to go ahead and and have a barbecue and just be done with those. We so many chambers get stuck doing things that really aren't advancing their mission and lead and certainly staff leadership knows it. It's just getting the volunteer leadership to understand it. and the other thing I'd say is it's okay to get outside the box. I mean, probably one of the most interesting things about our chamber is we don't have any committees. All right. We don't do committees. because what we've learned is in 2019, who wants to serve on a committee? you know, we we ha work a different model, but it's it's okay to change. It's okay to be different and you can grow and be successful. In particular, know your you know your community. So what do you need to to change to go be successful? As I interviewed Derek Miller from the Salt Lake Chamber, he talked a lot about their foundation that they set up with getting together civic minded business leaders for social awareness and impact. And his his response is along those lines.
15:02.924 Brandon Burton
Well, I guess I'm Brandon, I'm gonna go back to what I was talking about with the foundation and that is to if you're not already doing it, my recommendation on an action item would be to get a group together of really civic minded business leaders and talk about creating an outlet through the chamber for this social awareness and desire for social impact. And it it has so many benefits, not the least of which course is actually helping to improve those social challenges by bringing business solutions into play. But then it also just I think sets business in the appropriate light as being a partner for solutions to problems and countering the false narrative that that they're a cause of of problems. And now we've got Beth Bowman from the Irving Las Calinas Chamber and She had a n a nice little tagline talking about being the four one one and nine one one for your community. So here's Beth. Absolutely. So I'm gonna go back to, you know, the Horizon initiative and and elevate my my colleague and good friend in Huntsville, Madison County Chamber of Commerce, Chip Cherry, and he really took the lead on bringing the ninth influence. around the horizon initiative for engaging the public sector. You know, as we look to the future in in you know issue areas from governance to diversity, equity and inclusion are critical, you know, the chamber, as I shared earlier, you know, you're the 411 and the 911 for your community, which means you, you know, have to have a relationship with your municipal stakeholders, your governmental entities at a local level. It might not look like it does in our community of Irving Las Colinas and that is absolutely okay. But chambers have to be a resource for business industry and get into public policy, advocacy, and economic development day in and day out t in order to continue to thrive and survive through an ever changing economy.
17:18.773 Brandon Burton
really proud of the great work ACCE has done, the board, the entire staff to bring this influence in and sh and really help those chambers understand what does engaging the public sector look like and how can I apply that to my local community. That's right. You know, in urban Oscalinas, you know, there's not a day goes by that I'm not on the phone with our mayor or council or state leadership on on an item or an initiative and and you know they're calling myself or our team asking, you know, where's the chamber at on this or where's the business industry at on this and asking for our opinion. We are also calling them and making sure we're staying ahead of issues that might be coming forward and saying, Hey, are you aware there's a cluster of business industry that's going to have concerns? Have you thought about A, B, C and D? All right, so far these have all been great answers. And these last four that we're gonna hear from are the two thousand nineteen ACCE Chamber of the Year winners. first up is Michelle Bundren from the Murray Callaway County Chamber, and she talks about listening to data and your members and being willing to change. So here's Michelle. in terms of everything, you know, I think One thing that's really helped us over the years is to listen to the data, listen to your members. it's all relational, and then be willing to make any changes to programming, to anything, initiatives, maybe taking away some things you're doing and creating new things. I think listening and actually making changes shows that you're willing. to adapt to the ch you know, the ever evolving economy and and the way things are. I think we've been able to do that and, you know, members really respect that. So I guess my advice or action item would just be to be engaged and to really listen. to so that you're serving members' wants and needs, not what you think they want or need or what you can maybe you don't want to change some of the programming 'cause it's easy.
19:43.043 Brandon Burton
so that would definitely be a suggestion is to listen and be willing to make changes. Thank you, Michelle. next up is Dave Jokum from the Longview Chamber. And he talks about the importance of having a strategic plan. what I would say to that, Brandon, it's it's not an easy thing, right? So it's it's not something you're gonna do today or tomorrow or next week. It's gonna take some time. But I think a big key to all of this for us was that strategic plan. And so I think, you know, getting with whether it's the staff or the board or the executive board, whoever it is at your chamber that or the real decision makers for that, I I think it's it's thinking through and and setting down and writing what are we about? What what what do we need to be about for our town? What does our town need from us? And what does that look like? How do we how do we verbalize that? And then How do we make it a strategic plan so so that we're intentional in our work? We're not just I I I think a a challenge in chamber work is you can get so caught up in running from thing to thing to thing, you know, busy with event after event or w whatever it is, that you lose sight of the fact that you're trying to accomplish something bigger than the next luncheon, you know. and and we have luncheons. but we we started thinking of our luncheons in terms of how is this luncheon gonna help advance our strategic plan? How is this luncheon help us reach the goals that we have set forth? How is this luncheon contribute to the betterment of our community rather than just being, hey, come eat lunch, we'll either entertain you or give you some information and send you on your way to let's make it part of the strategy. so that again, I know that's not an easy thing to
21:46.574 Brandon Burton
To walk off with. But I think it's key if if you don't have that, man, I would I wouldn't do anything else until I had that set. What is our strategy going to be from here forward? All right. And Kit Kramer from the Asheville area chamber. She talked about the importance of a tier dues model, but not so much the model itself, but the program program exploration. as you put together a tear does model. And well, I'll let her explain what she means by that. Here's Kit. Gosh, I mean for us, I I'll tell you one of the processes we went through in the last year also, last year and a half actually, is is creating tier dos. And it's not so much the tier dues model itself, it's the exploration, I think, that has been so powerful. really understanding the motivations of our members. I mean, we've we've gone so far as to develop personas for the different types of members we have. And so that we have a shorthand to talk about those different types of members and what their motivations might be. Because we wanted everybody, because we do economic development as well as the chamber, it's important to us that everybody be able to speak to how people can plug in. and to break down silos between between the different areas of work. And that process of really taking a look at what your member, understanding what your members' motivations are and how you can, and then looking at your programming and figuring out what most appeals to different the different branches of your membership was I I think it's it's changed the way we think about the work we do. And it also allowed us to customize programming and in a way that that has been very, very impactful. So that's what I would recommend that they do that everyone do is take a look at their programming with that understanding member motivations. Okay, and f last but not least, we have Kent Euler from the Greater Louisville Inc. And Kent he focused his answer on the Horizon initiative. So here's Kent Euler.
24:09.942 Brandon Burton
Yeah, I I think that one thing that every chamber should do if they haven't already is go to ACCE dot org or wherever you get it and read the Horizon report that was written in twenty it's Horizon Initiative Chambers twenty twenty five. It was written a couple of years ago and then they've added there's eight mega trends within Chamber World and they've added a ninth one since that are just Critical for us to understand. And I know here at GLI we pay a lot of attention to that. We've had our board read it, our staff read it, we've built it into our planning. But it's things like the changing demographics. so as people get younger and the millennial generation doesn't join organizations in the same way and they're looking for different things. And there's technology trends on how people interact. for instance, now we we have big presence on Instagram, Twitter, probably on Snapchat for all I know. and and people spending a lot of time to make sure that our message connects with them. And I'm you know, I had to be convinced quite honestly on social media, how important it was and I'm just now I believe we have probably as many people on social media followers as we have on our our mailing list. So it's a big deal. but that's getting out the the messaging. And then you know it's there's population shifts that are happening. The job you know, the the the job wars are here. every chamber, every city has in a war for talent, and you are competing with each other. We are competing with other cities and other towns for talent. we have in our city twenty seven thousand open jobs, so you know, we have to be able to be masters of talent attraction and retention and that's the big initiative that we have here around talent attraction as as many people thought too. And I if anybody actually wants to see a really good talent site, we have this Our brand on that is called Live in Lou, L I V E I N L O U dot com. And we built out just a a a presence there as well as a lot of tools for employers to help sell our city because we know that Mobile's a nice place. It is a anybody that comes here after they're here, they always go, Wow, I didn't know I didn't expect that. This is great. But
26:36.13 Brandon Burton
They don't necessarily we're not on their radar screen, so we have to be able to be out there and market it. And then you know, the role of chambers is is kind of the the rational player in a very polarized world. I know we we had situations with our school system where it was there was a threat of it being taken over by the state and we had to help step in the middle and and work with both sides of that to to avoid take over the system, which we felt would be a disastrous for education for a kid. So you know all that stuff are are influences that are shaping chambers and chambers need to adapt or they risk being irrelevant. And we've embraced that. Alright. Well I hope that condensing all these answers into one episode for you is helpful. I hope that this episode provided some ideas that you can act on. It's one thing to sit here and listen to great ideas, but it's a totally other thing to go act on these ideas. So please take take one or two of these items. It may be overwhelming to try to implement everything at once, but take one or two items, start working on them, and then you can, you know, add more to it as you're ready. You can always go back to listen to this episode again or dive in deeper into their individual episodes. You can also visit the show notes page at chamberchatpodcast dot com slash episode thirty-six. For the Cliff Notes version of this episode as a reminder to to reference. But thank you for being here and for being a part of this Chamberchat Podcast community. I love doing this podcast, and I would love to hear feedback from you so I can better serve you. You can email me at Brandon at ChamberThat Podcast dot com or you can leave me a comment on the show notes page and I promise to get back to you.
28:32.896 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 35 — Irving-LasColinas Chamber 2019 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Beth Bowman
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Beth Bowman
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.192 Brandon Burton
This is a special edition of Chamber Chat Podcast as I begin a series of interviewing the finalist for Chamber of the Year for 2019. I hope you enjoyed this series, but first, the intro. 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.
00:29.966 Brandon Burton
Thank you for tuning in today for our twelfth and final interview in our special series of 2019 ACCE Chamber of the Year Finalists. This is episode 35 of Chamber Chat Podcast, and I'm Brandon Burton. It is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your Chamber members and your community. If you're new to the show, please visit our Get Started page so you can learn more about what the podcast is all about. what you can expect from the show, and you can receive some valuable tips for some non-dues revenue ideas to use at your chamber. The address for that is chamberchatpodcast.com/slash start. So our guest today is Beth Bowman. Beth is the president and CEO of the Greater Irving Las Calinas Chamber of Commerce in Texas. The it would the first five-star accredited chamber in Texas, and she's the president of the Irving Economic Development Partnership. As CEO for the chamber, Bowman leads the 1800-member chamber that includes more than 30 Fortune 1000 companies. She's responsible for providing value, information, services, programming, and access to opportunities that help chamber member investors realize success and profits. She also advocates for local, statewide, and national public policies that support a successful environment for the business community. As president of the Irving Economic Development Partnership, Beth led the team responsible for recruiting and retaining a number of Fortune five hundred enterprises, mid-sized and small companies including McKesson Corporation, Paps Brewing Company, Chucky Cheese, Fidelity, Michaels, Holt Kat, and NEC to name a few. Bowman is a champion for business, the city of Irving and its citizens working to improve the quality of life and Education and opportunities for all. Bowman is a recipient of the Dallas Business Journal's 2016 Women in Business, an award honoring North Texas's most most influential businesswomen who are making a difference in their workplace, blazing trails for other women and making a positive impact on their communities. She's a mentor for the Dallas Business Journal's Biz Women Mentoring Monday and is a trusted advisor to the founders.
02:51.582 Brandon Burton
Of Women's Leadership Live, a national initiative with mentors, workshops, and programs to promote leadership and entrepreneurship opportunities for women. Bowman organized and hosted the first Women's Leadership Live Conference. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce named Beth to its Chamber of Commerce Committee of 100. She is also a member of the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives. And served as a judge for the 2015 National Chamber of the Year Award. She serves on the Board of Directors for the North Texas Chamber Executives and the Texas Association of Business. In 2012, Beth was honored by the Dallas Business Journal as one of the 40 under 40 for her influential business leadership and community involvement. Beth's professional achievements include her CCE designation. She's a graduate of the Institute. of organizational management at Loyola Marymount University in California and is a certified Lean Six Sigma Greenbelt. Beth's talents are s are also highly sought after by local area volunteer organizations as she serves with many of them. Beth is a graduate of Baylor with a major in communications and a minor in business. She and her husband Steven enjoy spending free time with their children. We'll dive into a great conversation with Beth to learn more about what makes her chamber special and and becoming a Chamber of the Year finalist right after we take a quick moment to hear from our sponsor for this episode. Chambers are not considered for chamber of the year without having great programs and steady streams of non-dues revenue. I want to introduce you to a great affinity program from Swipe It. In partnership with Chamber Chat Podcast, Swipeit is one of the best credit card processors in the business. With the Swipe It Affinity program, you can save up to 40% on your credit card processing fees at the Chamber and help your member partners to do the same. Chambers who take advantage of the Swipe It Affinity program can add thousands of dollars to their non-dues revenue annually. Please visit
05:05.324 Brandon Burton
Chamberchatpodcast.com slash CC for more information and to request your complimentary cost savings analysis from the experts at Swipe It. The first 20 chambers to respond will qualify for free equipment to get set up. Again, visit Chamberchatpodcast.com slash CC to start swiping with Swipe It. All right, Beth, we are back. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. Please say hello to the audience and if you don't mind, share something interesting about yourself so we can get to know you a little bit better.
05:42.36 Beth Bowman
Well, hello Brandon. Thank you so much for having me on. I want to just say hello to all of our peers in the industry and their teams that might be tuning in to listen. it's truly a pleasure to lead our five star team here at home in Irving Moscelinas and really be a part of an impactful industry that's making a difference. On so many fronts, day in and day out, for business industry. So something interesting. I think you have maybe shared it in the bio. I have had the pleasure to work for the chamber for the past 14 years and counting as the last five as the the president and CEO. We're doing incredible things in our community in an interesting fact is my first job. I had the pleasure to be a birthday party hostess at Putt Put in a community just outside of Houston in Clear Lake. So that is my fun interesting fact for your viewers today.
06:50.51 Brandon Burton
Put put party planner. That is great. I know you're doing some great things there at the Irving Las Colinas Chamber because as I've had other guests on the show, multiple guests have said that I need to get Beth Bowman on the show because you're just you're doing great things. So both give a shout out to Tony Maline and and Jenna Armstrong for pointing me your direction.
06:53.026 Beth Bowman
That's
07:17.922 Beth Bowman
Right. Well those are two industry leaders that we are really spoiled to have in Texas. So I I think Jenna and Tony, they're doing respectfully great things in their community and and I will share, you know, we're only as strong as our weakest link and in Irving, our weak link is very strong. I just have the pleasure to lead the organization and day in and day out be responsive to our member investor needs and proactive. in areas that we're seeing we need to be more competitive in. but it's truly an an honor to work in this industry and a privilege to serve our 1900 member investors day in and day out. We also I think Brandon it's important for the audience to know structurally our chamber, you know, we we have a public-private partnership. So in our community we are the one stop shop for business industry. We have the economic development responsibility for the community. So we have contractual relationship with the City of Irving for Economic Development Services, as well as international affairs and sister cities. So for all of our friends in the industry, where their chamber and economic development organization is under the Chamber of Commerce, congratulations. I truly believe that's the best model that is customer focused. And we also have two five one C three foundations, our education foundation and our community development foundation.
08:47.232 Brandon Burton
All right. So that does that gives us little bit of a snapshot. I was going to ask as far as the size, the Irving Las Calinas Chamber. We know about nineteen hundred members. Can you share some more background with us about the Irving Las Calinas Chamber and kind of help familiarize listeners with with your chamber and kind of where you sit?
09:06.796 Beth Bowman
Yeah, so let me provide those that are listening in just a snapshot of our community. So we do have the privilege our 16 member team to serve our nineteen hundred member investors that are choosing to financially privately invest in our Chamber of Commerce to help us advance our five-star mission to create advocate and promote create advance and promote economic development for our member investors as well as our community. Through our economic development contract, though, we we also have a responsibility to work with the eighty five hundred businesses that call Urban Goss Planus home, as well as those that want to come home to Urban Goss Planet in the future. So we we always share, you know, we're the four one one for business industry, sometimes the nine one one, although in nine one one situations we hope that they have called the appropriate first responders so we can support. anything that might aid in helping them get their business or the manufacturing lines back online in a timely safe manner. Our community is just over 240,000. So we are just west of Dallas. If you fly into the global airport of the year, DFW International Airport, welcome home to Urban Las Palinas. So about 40% of our community resides within the limits of the airport. so as you travel you know, east into Dallas, you will drive through or hopefully stop and come home to our community in Urban Goss Planet. Some more about twenty miles east of our friends in Fort Worth. Our median age in our community is thirty two, so we're definitely a very young community. Our average voter is just over the age of sixty. So I'll let the viewers draw their own conclusions from those two numbers. We are the headquarters of the headquarters, home to about seven Fortune 500 headquarters, five Fortune 1000 headquarters. We have more headquarters per capita than any other community in Texas. So we're really proud Governor Abbott and our our team have worked close to make sure we we are the headquarters of headquarters and and keeping that is definitely a top priority for our community.
11:20.866 Beth Bowman
We have the privilege to have about seventy one percent of our local tax base that's coming from the commercial sector and the fourth most diverse city in the nation.
11:31.488 Brandon Burton
Wow. That is a a great resume right there for the Irving Las Colinas area. Yeah, there's there's something about that area. Just a couple of weeks ago we had Radonna Hessel on, as she as you know, Grapevine is a finalist for Chamber of the Year as well. And being just kind of an almost a neighboring city. you've got some small small cities in between you and Grapevine, but you guys are pretty darn close. And Something about being that part.
12:01.602 Beth Bowman
our next door neighbor.
12:03.436 Brandon Burton
Yeah. So I mentioned at the beginning this is our twelfth and final episode in this series of Chamber of the Year Finalists. And I wanted to just kinda ask you, and you're you just laid out a a great argument for why the Irving Oscillinas Chamber and and Irving Economic Development are doing such great things. But what from your perspective Why were you guys being considered as a finalist for Chamber of the Year? And what are some of those programs that are making you stand out?
12:35.308 Beth Bowman
So Brendan, I would say before we begin, I I first want to thank Sherry Ann and her team at ACCE. They do a phenomenal job allowing us to benchmark against our industries and in providing a library of resources so that we're continuing to have the most accurate data to be able to make local decisions that are best for our chambers. So really appreciate the great work that Sherri Ann and her team do at ACCE. I also want thank our colleagues that took their personal and professional time to serve as chamber of the year judges. having had the opportunity previously to serve as a chamber of the year judge, it it is a significant time commitment. so really, really appreciate the men and women that were willing to serve as judges and and then also to our neighbors in category four for chamber of the year finalists. our friends in Salt Lake and our friends in Louisville really just incredible company to be the top three finalists for chamber of the year in category four. So why are we a finalist? it it's a true commitment to the servant leadership, catalytic leaders that are the men and women that day in and day out choose to work at the chamber and the men and women that privately invest their personal time or their company time to continue to advance our mission throughout the community. I mean we we are an extension of our business industries team and that's how we position ourselves day in and day out. Our team is tackling you know five major priorities from economic development and public policy. To small business entrepreneurial services, workforce, talent initiatives, and also transportation and infrastructure. Those are the five areas that our team spends the majority of their time being able to respond to a problem, problem, problem crisis on behalf of our member investors and really be a part of a solution. two of the programs throughout our Chamber of the Year application that we really were able to spotlight and was
14:53.758 Beth Bowman
a share tank initiative which we believe was a place where we were innovative as well as a public policy initiative that we were able to lead on behalf of our industry. So I'll go ahead and start with the share tank initiative. There is this is a program that's been kind of founded and managed by the chamber it's a collaboration with our our City, our Convention and Visitors Bureau, our Arts Center, our local university for our communities, University of Dallas, and our entrepreneurial center, the study USA, along with private businesses, is run through our 501c3 Community Development Foundation. And its purpose is to connect nonprofit needing funding to business industry that's looking to give. I think often a lot of communities, nonprofits are either joining the chamber to get access to business industry or are looking to the chamber to, you know, provide sponsorship or warm introductions to business industry. And I think often nonprofits in the local community forget that the chamber itself is a nonprofit. Yes, we are a five point c six. So we are also going up and in a sense looking to pull from that same minimal pot of resources from the private sector. but what we realized with the chamber and the leadership amongst the stakeholders, you know, was there is an opportunity for the chamber to serve as a conduit through our community development foundation and provide our nonprofits with education at no cost, as well as providing. through that educational journey an opportunity for them to quote unquote pitch their nonprofit needs in front of a panel of sharers that is the private sector business industry or individuals of family foundations that are looking to give. We've had more than 40 nonprofits that have participated, 10 companies that have participated, we are going into our
17:20.311 Beth Bowman
Third year of Share Tank, and we've been able to provide countless hours of complementary training and about $40,000 in private funding to our nonprofits that have projects that need financial support. it's important, you know, as you look at the ACCE Horizons initiative, the the scarcity and abundance is program definitely addresses the scarcity of nonprofit funding and an abundance of desire by business industry to to engage in philanthropic giving. So it's really exciting to be able to work through the Horizon initiative and engage those two areas.
18:08.408 Brandon Burton
So as you go about this Share Tank initiative and I I I mean it seems easy enough to find the nonprofits who are seeking funding, but how do you go about attracting the businesses that are looking to give?
18:23.074 Beth Bowman
Yeah, so we we definitely are are fortunate to have our elective leadership involved. so it it it starts with, you know, our our chamber identifying business industry that has shared with us a desire to get involved and to give. we provide a communication to business industry reminding them about Share Tank. If this is a way that they want to evaluate nonprofits, be aware of various nonprofits and their impact. the community as well as areas to give. A share tank is definitely a place where all of those objectives can be met.
19:01.422 Brandon Burton
Very good. In fact, I I just came across the website that you have, herbingshare tank dot com. And just kinda looking around on that a little bit. So we'll we'll put a link to this in the show notes so people listening if they wanted to dive in a little bit deeper and see what ShareTank is all about. Seems like a great strategy to match up those the the scarcity with abundance, right?
19:25.006 Beth Bowman
Absolutely. And you know, and I again, Brandon, I think, you know, the target audience is our nonprofits and our philanthropic business community. You know, the mission of the share tank for the community development foundation of the chamber is focusing on that creating, promoting, advancing the economic growth for Irving's robust nonprofit community. I mean, these these organizations are often providing those in our communities that are most in need. and a quality of life for our residents. That also encourages, you know, urban west planes to continue to be a great place to live, work and play. the work that our nonprofits do complement truly the work that our economic development team has the privilege to do day in and day out.
20:12.054 Brandon Burton
That's right. Yeah, it's a it seems like a great, great strategy and great initiative to to be behind. Do you wanna dive into your other initiative, the public policy initiative that you had mentioned?
20:25.942 Beth Bowman
Yeah, absolutely. So the the second program synopsis that we were able to really highlight and dive deep on. So public policy governmental affairs advocacy is a top priority. We have a dedicated executive on our team, Erica Mulder that leads our public policy initiative. She's a registered lobbyist, she's just got an extension of her team that represents us. in in Austin as well as in DC and then we leverage our state chamber Texas Association of Business as well as the US Chamber of Commerce to continue to advance our state and federal initiatives that are established by our board of directors. So from a from an advocacy perspective, as I shared at the beginning of the show, you know, for the past 16 years we've had the ability to have a beautiful public private partnership that many in in the community have benefited from as well as our member investors. however that public-private partnership was was really under scrutiny and we wanted to make sure to protect the public-private partnership in the chamber industry as it related to the customer. So obviously the the areas and impacts that were addressed is our public policy, advocacy campaign and and then at the end of the day a legislative victory. So during our legislative session, and this was back during the the 85th legislative session, our state meets every other year. There were some bills that were targeting chambers that received public dollars through membership or contract of services. the legislation that was being proposed would have been that the chambers are quote unquote governmental bodies falling under the Public Information Act and and subject to open records request. Our chamber, you know, was really successful in leading an effort to educate and advocate, coordinate testimony and opposition, enlisting chambers, economic development organizations, and nonprofits ultimately during that session.
22:42.002 Beth Bowman
the bills have died. this work you know really has it in in an area so tie back to the Verizons initiative, you know, it it's able for us to advance the communication technology, political and social fragmentation as we ensure our member investors and chamber partners truly understood first and foremost the impact of the legislation and that we also worked To develop language for a compromise. So, as in the 85th, the bill died. That forward, we knew in the 86th legislative session, this was going to come back up again. And our chamber remained at the table helping to craft the legislation so that public-private partnerships could be protected. Public-private partnerships had a commitment to transparency, but public-private partnerships, as it relates to economic development and the ability to continue to report. recruit and retain, bring quality jobs to Texas, specifically for our community in Irving Las Calinas, that that work was not impacted.
23:53.762 Brandon Burton
Well, being a Texan myself, I'm grateful for the work you guys are doing and bringing the jobs to Texas and keeping our economy great and strong and it it's not going unnoticed, that's for sure. Thank you.
24:07.906 Beth Bowman
Yeah, so proud of our team because there's so you know, there there there's a lot of congestion when it comes to the legislative process, right? It's it's cumbersome, often challenging to understand. it's a testament to the great work of our team to really understand the the language and the impact. then we were able to notify, you know, really our peers across the state of Texas. making sure, you know, that anybody that had, you know, economic development contracts with their local municipalities or convention and visitor bureau contracts were aware of the proposed legislation. And it allowed us to learn best practices of how other communities are reporting or communicating with the pu with any you know public dollars that that are received for services. and what we were able to do is continue to showcase the model that we use here for other communities to benefit from as again the the important and commitment to transportation is critical. However, in the fiercely competitive market we are in, especially within the urban Los Planets North Texas area, it's really important that we're able to keep the confidentiality of project work. Our team has the privilege to work on day in and day out.
25:30.686 Brandon Burton
Absolutely. So as you were explaining all this with the the relationship, the public private front that that you guys have there, in doing the economic development work, you had mentioned early in the interview that there you guys are representing and working with about eighty five hundred businesses in the Irving area. Are you able to bridge the gap between economic development and the chamber, or are you just strictly economic development when you're dealing with them?
25:59.914 Beth Bowman
Yeah, so I also would say that we're a model. there there is definitely, you know, that that firewall internally. economic development when it comes to the project pipeline and the ability to recruit or retain or respect the company's you know, non disclosure agreement. The the team is takes that very seriously. However, because we are the one stop shop for business industry and have the pleasure to work with these companies and provide solutions around you know thought selection or integration into the community, naturally you know, the team wants to continue to be engaged, the team from the company. and one way that they're engaging the community is is through the chamber. and that can be from traditional membership, serving as an expert speaker, being willing to talk to supply chain MWBE workshops, you know, about how to do business, if they're a larger enterprise company or manufacturing company, which is really a huge win for our small business entrepreneurs, MWBE member investors.
27:12.438 Brandon Burton
I love that you'd mentioned about being an expert speaker to be able to help involve them and include them with the chamber. That seems like a great way to to make that introduction and get them involved and show value to them in their business. Great idea.
27:27.358 Beth Bowman
And there is you know, I I know it's a lot of chambers, you know, from the membership perspective, right? I mean, it's the heart and soul of who we are as as a chamber. Without our members, we really don't have a business to serve. But today, traditionally, you know, you see a lot of companies that are not, you know, joiners, right? They're not wanting to write a membership check. So our team really has the ability and and the beauty to be individual consultants to business industry, all within our specific areas of expertise. so I think it's really important that our business industry, you know, be be respectful of how the chamber of industry has evolved and continue to be flexible and and meet the needs of member investors and some of that might be non traditional. And that's okay.
28:15.278 Brandon Burton
Yep, just continue to evolve and be flexible. That hits the nail on the head. So, Beth, from what we've discussed today and what what you presented, can you kind of summarize and maybe give one solid action item that listeners can do to kind of level up their chamber to the the next level?
28:37.934 Beth Bowman
Absolutely. So I'm gonna go back to you know the Horizon Initiative and and elevate and my my colleague and good friend in Huntsville, Madison County Chamber of Commerce, Chip Cherry, and he really took the lead on bringing the ninth influence around the Horizon Initiative for engaging the public sector. You know, as we look to the future and in you know issue areas from governance To diversity, equity, and inclusion are critical. You know, the chambers I shared earlier, you know, you're the 411 and the 911 for your community, which means you, you know, have to have a relationship with your municipal stakeholders, your governmental entities at a local level. It might not look like it does in our community of Irving Las Salinas, and that is absolutely okay. But chambers has to be a resource for business industry and get into public policy, advocacy, and economic development day in and day out t in order to continue to thrive and survive through an ever changing economy. I'm really proud of the great work ACCE has done, the board, the entire staff to bring this influence in and sh really help. those chambers understand what does engaging the public sector look like and how can I apply that to my local community. That's right. You know, in urban hospitaliness, you there's not a day goes by that I'm not on the phone with our mayor or council or state leadership on on an item or an initiative and and you know, they're calling myself or our team asking, you know, where's the chamber at on this or where's business industry at on this and asking for our opinion. We are also calling them and making sure we're staying ahead of issues that might be coming forward and saying, hey, are you aware there's a cluster of business industry that's going to have concerns? Have you thought about A, B, C, and D?
30:43.422 Brandon Burton
So that's how you can tell there's a healthy relationship when the phone calls are going both ways. So that's that's good. Good example. So I'd like to ask everybody you have on the show this question that and you you referenced the the ACC Horizon initiative and you may again with this answer, but as we look to the future, how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose?
31:09.954 Beth Bowman
Yeah, so Chamber's a commerce unit, we're we're we're the conduit and we're convening often. it's our area of expertise. You know, we are bringing together business industry, private sector, public sector, nonprofits. The chamber brand has that ability and has that authority. it allows us to be productive in economic development, it allows us to be extremely influential in advocacy efforts. And and I think we also have an opportunity to broaden that and and connect the dots, you know, what we're doing in Irving Rock Planet, how is that impacting, you know, nationally our industry and helping other communities thrive. What's happening in Great Vine, what's the great work that they're doing that's helping us in Irving Rock Planet thrive and survive. We have to continue to not just say that we're gonna be a leader in diversity, equity, inclusion. but most importantly, we have to become that leader. and I really want to emphasise emphasize the inclusion piece. You know, as I shared earlier in our community, we're the 14th most diverse city in the nation. Under our Irving Oscillinas five year strategic plan entitled Powering Progress, a top priority is for us to be able to champion champion diversity, equity, and inclusion. When we are looking at, you know, from our administration and personnel manual hiring talent, bringing on, you know, board members through the nominating process, we are using and implementing various rules in the Rooney rule and the Mansfield rule 2.0 and and just for those that are listening as a reminder these are rules that require a ratio of minority candidates. To be considered for position. we we will continue to strive to have MOUs with ethnicity chambers that allow us to be stronger together, continue to partner with our community locally in improving the Urban Human Rights Municipal Quality Index score. a couple years ago, you know, it was brought to our attention that our community score was extremely low, and through the chamber working with
33:35.358 Beth Bowman
our partners at the city, we've been able to increase that score by about 328% year over year, which is excellent work, but we have more to do. Continuing to make sure, you know, that we're facilitating you know, round tables with industry topics that that matter, we'll be continuing to elevate our minority leadership fellowship, which is where we are rotating an ex officio board seat. For minority community leaders, which includes a complementary attendance to all of our chamber programming through our chamber DEI committee, our diversity, equity, inclusion committee. And then also just making sure we are constantly having impactful, purposeful conversations with our elected officials so that they understand as they're establishing law, making sure that our state remains. competitive for all.
34:35.862 Brandon Burton
So you're telling me Irving's not just a bunch of cowboys? You guys are diverse there? I'm just I'm just joking.
34:43.31 Beth Bowman
We definitely have our cowboys. We are very, very comfortable in our route. but we are also, you know, a community as we have companies that are choosing to come home here, you know, they're running the global economy and and they're bringing the best and broadest talent in. and that talent is beautifully being blended together and integrated into communities. So the great news is the chamber has a role to play in making sure we're effectively communicating, you know, how do we work well with our neighbors? You know, that might not look like you know, I look or you you look, Raymond, but that we're working together through strengthening our community as an area where we can agree and making a difference. while growing and building upon the strong foundation that we have in Irving Ross Lane.
35:38.322 Brandon Burton
It's a it's a beautiful thing to see all the diversity come together and and thrive and be so successful as it is there in Irving.
35:46.966 Beth Bowman
And and and it it's on you know, sometimes it's uncomfortable, right? But I always share, you know, in those uncomfortable conversations it's where leaders have the opportunity to learn. and on the other side of that uncomfortable is a beautiful view of inclusion, where you where you just get to see organic relationships coming together that everybody has the the privilege to benefit from.
36:14.094 Brandon Burton
That's right. So Beth, I know we need to wrap things up here, but I wanted to thank you for spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. And as usual, thank everybody who's out there listening. The show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode thirty-five. And Beth, for those that are listening that would like to connect with you with any questions about how you're doing things there at the Irving Las Calinas Chamber, how can they reach you?
36:43.82 Beth Bowman
Yeah, so definitely more than welcome to email me at bbowman at urvingchamber.com. So that's two B Z and Boy O W and as a Mary A and as a Nancy at IrvingCamber dot com. they're welcome to call our main line as well at 214-217-8484. and connect with Hiana who runs our office and she'll make sure to get anyone in touch with myself or a five star member of our team.
37:17.646 Brandon Burton
Awesome. And we will get all that updated in the show notes. But again, thank you for spending time with us today and for being a great example to everybody out there in the chamber world. Thanks a lot.
37:29.08 Beth Bowman
Raymond, thank you so much. Have a great day.
37:35.67 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 34 — Effingham County Chamber 2019 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Norma Lansing
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Norma Lansing
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.226 Brandon Burton
This is a special edition of Chamber Chat Podcast as I begin a series of interviewing the finalist for Chamber of the Year for 2019. I hope you enjoyed this series, but first, the intro. 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.
00:29.912 Brandon Burton
Thank you for tuning in today for our 11th interview in our special series of 2019 ACCE Chamber of the Year finalists. This is episode 34 of Chamber Chat Podcast, and I'm Brandon Burton. It is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your Chamber members and your community. If you're new to Chamber Chat Podcast, please visit our Getting Started page to learn more about what you can expect from the show. And you can receive some valuable tips for some non-dues revenue ideas to use at your chamber. That address is chambertepodcast.com/slash start. Our guest today is Norma Lansing, president and CEO of the Effingham County Chamber of Commerce in Illinois. Norma is a 40-year veteran in the chamber in Chamber of Commerce Management. She's actively involved in the community, serving on the executive board of the Effingham Regional Career Academy and on the boards of the Effingham Regional Growth Alliance and Effingham Regional Incubator Network. As a member of the Effingham Noon Rotary Club, Lansing has served as president, is a Paul Harris Fellow, and received Rotary's Vocational Excellence Award. She is past chairman of the board of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce Executives and recipient of the association's highest award for achievement, the Lester W. Brand Distinguished Chamber Executive Award. Lansing is also a recipient of the Outstanding Leadership in Community and Economic Development Award from East Central Illinois Development Corporation and the Illinois Workforce Partnership Leadership Award. Norma and her husband, Ken, have three children. Seven grandchildren and one great grandchild, and live at Lake Sarah. Today, Norma is going to teach us some things about chamber businesses leveraging their membership on behalf of their employees, and about how her chamber is helping new businesses start and grow. Right after we take a quick moment to learn about our sponsor for this episode. Chambers are not considered for chamber of the year without having great programs and steady streams of non-duce revenue.
02:47.882 Brandon Burton
I want to introduce you to a great affinity program from Swipe It. In partnership with Chamber Chat Podcast, Swipe It is one of the best credit card processors in the business. With the Swipe It Affinity program, you can save up to 40% on your credit card processing fees at the chamber and help your member partners to do the same. Chambers who take advantage of the Swipe It Affinity program can add thousands of dollars to their non-dues revenue annually. Please visit Chamberchatpodcast.com slash CC for more information and to request your complimentary cost savings analysis from the experts at Swipe It. The first 20 chambers to respond will qualify for free equipment to get set up. Again, visit Chamberchatpodcast.com/slash CC to start swiping with Swipeit. Norma, welcome to Chamberchat Podcast. Say hello to our audience and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
03:53.976 Norma Lansing
Well, good morning. interesting about me, I think probably in my intro when it talked about me being involved with the chamber for over forty years, that's probably the most interesting thing for the audience because that's kind of unusual in today's in any of any vocation, any career choice that people stay in a position for that length of time or in it with a the same company. So but you do that. When you do that, it's because you enjoy what you do and really wanna continue to give back. And so, you know, when I think about the chamber here in Effingham County, we are very engaged in our community and our community looks to us for leadership in a number of ways. So yes, we're a membership organization and we rely heavily on our members for their support, but in reality we are a community development organization. at heart and and honor that in a in a variety in the in the program that we do.
04:57.75 Brandon Burton
Very good. I think what's really interesting is to be able to be a forty year veteran in the chamber industry and only be twenty nine years old. That's that's what's interesting to me. Now can you can you share with us a little bit about the Effingham County Chamber, kind of the size and kind of where you guys sit so we can all relate a little bit better to your chamber?
05:06.882 Norma Lansing
Exactly.
05:20.94 Norma Lansing
Well, we are located Effingham is at the crossroads of interstates fifty-seven and seventy in Illinois, kind of central Illinois location. So, you know, we're at the heart of not only Illinois, but the the whole country because of the transportation network that we have here. We have probably for a a community, a town, the city of Effingham is about fourteen thousand. Effingham County is about thirty-four thousand. But we have 20 motels, 65 restaurants, 20,000 vehicles a day passed through our community. So Effingham, the city proper, grows, the population of the city grows three times during the day at during the day versus at night when people are coming in for employment. So a regional hub for many different kinds of government entities and Like I said, the in the in the hospitality industry we're very large for our size.
06:24.172 Brandon Burton
Yeah, it sounds like it. That's that's pretty impressive to triple in size during the workday. So as I mentioned at the beginning, this is our eleventh interview of Chamber of the Year finalists. And I like to just see from your perspective what makes the Effingham County Chamber stand out to be considered this year as a finalist for Chamber of the Year.
06:47.864 Norma Lansing
Well, one of the, you know, if you know the Chamber of the Year process, first you have to qualify by meeting certain benchmarks in the Chamber Operations Survey. So I think our strong suit there is in our retention numbers. I mean, we are consistently in the mid 90% retention rate. So that speaks volumes about the people our members, the support that we have, the staff here at the chamber, in particular our membership director. Becky Brown who does a many, many things for us. And you know, she she's just a great connector with our business people and because of that we have this amazing retention rate. So I think that's that's key there is that being able to retain the members that you have, make them happy while continue to grow with new members and a new member base. So I think that's that's one of the keys in the Chamber the Year. process or felt the finalist category. The other thing I think is strong is is when I go back to that community focus that we have and the programs that we submitted for consideration.
08:00.428 Brandon Burton
Yeah. Okay. So can you tell us a little bit about some of those programs that you submitted?
08:06.196 Norma Lansing
the one that I I guess I'm really proud of is our business outreach center. And I think many communities, many chambers offer that service. Ours came about, ours is maybe a little different. we rely it's an all-volunteer effort with our members, both active business people and retired business people who are willing to give their time to help other business or who help others who either have a business already and have needs to grow or change their business focus to those people who have a business idea and really want to help help getting that started. So when the Small Business Development Centers program in Illinois kind of in many communities folded because of state budget concerns, we decided, we looked at many options and we decided to kind of build our own program. So Business Outreach Center is a part of the chamber, it's a fun as a program of the chamber. Like I said, we have about 20 or 30 active mentors who meet with clients. In fact, we just had an intake interview yesterday with someone who's wanting to look at starting a business. We've helped people sell businesses, we've helped people buy businesses, you know, we've done a number of different things. Some of our success stories have been a a popular downtown restaurant. Three young three young men, three young professionals who decided to buy a historic building and renovate it and open up a I would call it a Dave and Buster style restaurant. That's a great restaurant, but it has golf and hunting and simulators. It has a arcade area for kids. so it's a great it's a great program. We've got about 20 active clients right now who are meeting with various mentors. I think the other ne individual thing that we do well is when someone comes to us with an idea and this intake process that goes on, we identify, you know, what what are there really their needs. They come in, they might say, Well, I need a business plan. Yes, they need it, they need a business plan, but what else do they need? What unique feature of this business? So we really go out, reach out to someone who we feel can
10:30.188 Norma Lansing
be their best mentor. So even if they're not in our assist in our database of mentors, we'll go out and recruit somebody to help them.
10:38.574 Brandon Burton
I'm glad you mentioned that. I was gonna ask about the mentors, what kind of backgrounds they come from and how you go about getting these volunteer mentors to help out with the business outreach center.
10:50.488 Norma Lansing
So, you know, there's a just a lot of business people who who want to give back. We're this is a very giving community from every aspect of giving their time, giving their talent, giving their money. you know, from a charitable giving perspective, it's amazing here. But in this particular venture, you know, these are people who many who've volunteered, but as I said, you know, depending on the individual need, we'll go out and recruit.
11:16.366 Brandon Burton
I like that you're not afraid to go out and and find the people to to fit those matches that you're looking for. I imagine the people that are coming through the business outreach center have a wide variety of different needs, from just having a coach to writing a business plan to maybe financing, I would guess. What are what are some of those main issues that you see for somebody start looking to start or grow their business? What are some of those needs that they're looking for?
11:45.688 Norma Lansing
Well, I think that and this is, you know, with my long career it's not not ch some of those have not changed a lot. You know, people need when you're wanna start a business, you know, you have to have your own skin in the game. And I think that's the most important piece that people need to understand that they have to have they have to they have to have some cash in the bank to make that happen. They have to have the investment of their time, their personal time in being able to put this together. You know, we're we've got one client right now who has a great product. They're trying to figure out how to take it to a manufacturer, you know, find a manufacturer to help them manufacture this product. Just to to be able to connect people like that, even is something that we've done, which is really kind of a unique fact or a unique situation that that he's got a great product, found an idea of you know a need that's out there that needs to be addressed. has has the product developed now is just trying to take it to market basically.
12:46.86 Brandon Burton
Yeah, that's cool. are there maybe a couple other examples of success stories you've seen come through this business outreach center? You mentioned the the restaurant, the Daven Buster style restaurant.
12:57.326 Norma Lansing
A pet grooming company. we just assisted a a a woman who wanted bought our local health food store. so really all the whole process of purchasing, you know, putting together her her budget needs, her finan you know her long term, her goals for that. she's actually been able to purchase that. She's relocating it into a larger location that's right next door to where it was originally And then adding new adding new services and new products to that. She's planning to have a a juice bar and some other things like that. So it's really a gamut of things. We've, you know, we have a new client that's now looking at the hemp industry and trying to get into that industry. So just a l just a wide variety, like I said, everything from a pet grooming to starting a whole taking a product to market to starting a new business. But
13:56.462 Brandon Burton
Really exciting. Yeah is there do you have maybe a page on your website that would talk more about this program and what all it has to offer? Just so we could if for other chambers that are listening, we can point them there and they can see kind of how you're structured.
14:13.666 Norma Lansing
website it's under the business center section and it's still called in the drop down box the best business development center but if you go to the then it comes up to the correct information but yeah we've we've got a lot of different things that we're working on but we we have some information out there definitely you know part of that what we were able to offer them is we have a you know a notary here on staff who can handle that and we're finding that to be something that's being more widely used all the time. So there's many services like that in that particular environment. We have space that here at our office that we that they can utilize if they you know for if they need some help or if they just need to come in and and have a space. Some people don't want to work out of their home so we have that space here but the other exciting thing that we're working on is with our regional business incubator network and we're just getting ready to, we just signed a lease on a downtown space that we're really excited to be, more of a co-working environment for people, more of a drop-in space. So that's that's new and just like I said, that's still in development. So that's another aspect of the chamber and a collaboration that we have with other organizations and entities to make that happen.
15:35.096 Brandon Burton
So the co working space will actually be something the chamber helps to I guess promote and establish. Is that is that what I'm understanding? Okay.
15:45.614 Norma Lansing
you know, as talked about community focused and collabor you know, we're very we're very collaborative in nature and working with other organizations. So we partner with our economic development organization, our community foundation, other, you know, or entities like that, our library and many other organizations that we collaborate with to make things like this happen. Our so this incubator space, our new space. The other kind of interesting concept with that is as it's called the FM Regional Incubator Network. And the the network is several incubator sites across our s count our county and in a neighboring county. And so we all work together instead of competing for clients, we've created this network comp situation where we have a common application process and common rental agreements and things like that. So When you know, when somebody's looking for space, then they can use any one of those four or five locations that we have. but they're all working kind of with with the same structure. So that I think is a good thing for the community and the people looking or who are out there working from home or whatever their needs are. Say, you know, they're maybe part of the they work for a company who's in another state or something like that, but they want some place where they can get away from their home environment and have some place to meet with other entrepreneurs. So we're pretty excited about what this new space is gonna do for us.
17:24.354 Brandon Burton
I love it. And as you were explaining that, it really was kind of catching the vision of how it all ties together. You know, the chamber and the business outreach center and the incubator and the w coworking space and it all just kind of feeds into each other, all to support the main purpose and and I guess mission of the chamber to promote business in the area. So I that's great. I I think that's a a neat strategy that you're going about. So I had mentioned in the in the introduction that you'd also be going over some things with us about how your chamber member businesses can leverage their membership for their employees. can you share with us about that initiative that you have going on and kind of how that came to be and and just what it's all about.
18:16.074 Norma Lansing
you know and most chambers are and I think this is across the board with chambers, but when a business joins the chamber, all of their employees are basically chamber members too. So they can, you know, they can come to an event, they can come to any event they want. They can, you know, participate in a number of ways in the chamber. We like to to talk about, you know, being part of a a committee and and from a business perspective The leadership development that occurs with that, the networking that occurs with that. You know, the owner of the business, the manager business has one network of people that they affiliate with. Their employees have a different network that they affiliate with. And so they broaden the the their business outreach by getting their employees involved. That's one thing that I think is huge. But we created a We kind of created a poster for businesses to be able to post in their employee lounges or wherever their employees are at. It really talks about that thought of employees or members too. We have a a scholarship program that we're we we give every year that's both adult and high school senior graduates scholarships that businesses support through their donations, but then we give then the the other factor of that is Only employees or family members of employees can apply for that scholarship. But exponentially that means, you know, tens of thousands of people are act or have access to this scholarship program. This year we gave fourteen one thousand dollar scholarships, which is our most effort.
20:01.494 Brandon Burton
Yeah, that's that makes a nice dent in in some tuition there.
20:06.968 Norma Lansing
But with that scholarship program right now, what we're looking at is really how can we connect that more to the career and technical education market that's so important to our businesses. So probably in 2020 we'll have a new a different set of scholarships that we're gonna be offering for those, you know, tied to that particular category of work of people going into maybe going directly from call to high school into the workforce. And that's kind of driven. I wanted to be sure and talk about another program that we're doing that's we're very collaborative with in the community and that's our Effingham Career Effingham Regional Career Academy. Everything if you notice all these things have the word regional in them for a reason.
20:53.654 Brandon Burton
That's right. Well when you're when you're a county chamber, you you bring in the the region, right? It's it's bigger than just your town.
21:01.666 Norma Lansing
Not just our county. It's we we don't serve just the businesses here. We serve businesses in a pretty broad area. But the Career Academy is another y unique program that we're putting together through our affiliation with our community college and our high schools. We have six high schools in our county and they're all actively engaged in creating this career academy, which will be a actually a 36,000 square foot structure that our community college is going to be building. as part of their campus here in the city in Effingham. And so it will have that career and technical education and careers focus training. And we've identified five career areas that fit the needs of our community. So we have advanced manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, healthcare and technology are our five, the five career areas that we're focusing on. Initially we're currently doing some minimal programming with our in through our school systems right now, but we w won't have a physical building until about 2022, 2023, where students from all these high schools can come together in this learning environment to meet the needs of our businesses and and really focus. And it'll be a very 'cause I use that word collaborative a lot, but that's that's what we do. We do that. It's part of our the chamber kind of has a tagline. It's create, connect, collaborate. And we really feel strongly that collaboration is where we need to focus.
22:42.486 Brandon Burton
I love this change that we're seeing in the education models. And it's not just coming from individual school districts, but it's coming from chambers of commerce and from the community saying this is what the needs are of the employers. And let's let's help bridge that gap from what the students are learning at the high school level to making them be employable as soon as possible, set them up for success early on in life, and help the businesses here in your community to be able to higher from within the community and and just all together I love the way that model is shifting and how the chambers are taking a real driver's seat in and seeing that change happen. I love it. I I think it it seems like such a natural fit. It's one of those things you look back on and think, you know, how come this hasn't always been done this way, right?
23:34.146 Norma Lansing
yeah, and it it is not easy. I mean we're very fortunate that we have, you know, an education environment here that's we you know, we've always had a really strong connection and relationship and so it's it's great to have that. I know it's not that way everywhere. and that's unfortunate. So we feel really blessed that we have that here.
23:56.096 Brandon Burton
Yeah, for sure. Can you touch just a little bit on I I know in in some of the notes you had sent me before our interview, you had mentioned that you guys are preparing to undertake a countywide community mapping program in early twenty twenty. Yes. Can you let everybody know what that is and and what mapping is?
24:16.566 Norma Lansing
Well that you know we that is a a it's an acronym and it's through the Illinois Institute for Real Affairs at Western Illinois University, the mapping is is an acronym for management and planning programs involving non-metropolitan groups. So it's a lot, it's really, I mean, if you want to boil it down, it's community visioning is what it is. they've done this very successfully in many communities across Illinois. one of our communities here in Effingham County are getting ready to do their fifth mapping initiative through this through Illinois Institute for Real Affairs. We're we're getting ready to launch that in early 2020. We really want to take that on as a countywide initiative rather than an individual community. We feel that there are many issues that as a county effort we can address. And then hopefully you know each individual community will also look at how they can im have an impact in in any of those areas. Started down this path really looking at, you know, what do we want Effingham County to look like in the future and how are we going to get there? And who's gonna who's who's gonna take on what role in that? You know, the chamber's gonna be doing some of that. other, you know, the villages, the town, you know, the town boards, the county board, the city councils, whoever they are, other organizations, the community foundation, the library, whoever, you know, many of our small communities have small economic development groups or business groups that work. So everybody has a part to play in that. We're looking we're looking at having, you know, engaging about a hundred people in this effort from all over Effingham County to come together and spend some time just really drilling down into that, you know, who do we want to, who are we? And where do we want to FingM County grow in, you know, if it is it 2030, is it 2050, whatever that future benchmark is.
26:22.21 Brandon Burton
So I I think you've touched on some really great things today and some things that other chambers that are listening can take from and and apply at their chambers and maybe tweak some of their programs or some ideas that you've given today. But based on on what we've talked about, can you summarize down maybe one action item listeners can do to take their chamber up to the next level level?
26:49.678 Norma Lansing
Well, I think the most important thing for a the a chamber or maybe any community or countywide organization is just to make sure you're connecting with all the all the people, all the players in the county and and reaching out to other groups and your c education community, your governmental agents agencies and and economic development organizations and really sit down and work together. Because we're all in the we're all our all of our goals are to make our counties the best that they can be. And so we we we're stronger when we work together. So that's probably the message that I would have is just encouraging that collaboration, being being very collaborative, being very open and and honest in in in your functions, the way you do things. I mean, open, accessible as is is one of our values of our chamber. being open and accessible. So
27:50.616 Brandon Burton
I think that's a good piece of advice. And I would think also kind of going along with it is to not necessarily have to be the one to take the credit, right? If you're being collaborative, everybody's working for the good of those that you're serving. And that's how you're you're the most productive. That's great advice. So this next question I ask everybody that I have on the show, but as you look to the future, how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose?
28:22.028 Norma Lansing
Well, I you know, as I've I've talked a lot about being collaborative, but being commun you know, community focused is very important, I think, that communities struggle. if you're familiar with the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives Horizon Initiative, you know, they they started out with these eight ho areas of and that and so then they've just added this ninth one about local governments. And I think that that's really important that we that we look at that. You know, not everybody's gonna get involved in political active action and that's fine. I don't think we need I don't think we need to we do it very in a very limited way. We're not strongly in in that ad we're more advocates than we are political and and animals.
28:48.206 Brandon Burton
Yeah.
29:16.482 Norma Lansing
But so I think just being part of the solutions in the community and not you know not worrying if if if we get the credit or not for that. I think technology is used for chambers in the future. I mean we're looking at we're we're getting ready to launch a chamber app in the first part of September, and that's gonna be one of our main communication vehicles moving forward with our members. because everybody has a cell phone, everybody has a you know that piece of technology that they hold in their hand, then everything's on that piece. So we need to be there, we need to be where our members are. I think that's really critical. but I don't think we need to throw out those different pieces of of outreach that have been in existence. You know, a lot of people have gone away from print or anything like that. I think it needs to be used very strategically, but I don't think it needs to disappear. Mm-hmm. Certainly don't need to disappear.
30:22.55 Brandon Burton
I would agree. I think there's there's always a place for print, you know, being at the chamber. Yeah. People come in all the time asking for your chamber directory or map or, you know, different things. They just know the chamber's a place to get that. but Norman, I wanted to thank you so much for spending some time with with us this morning on Chamber Chat Podcast. And I always like to thank everybody out there listening as well. The show notes for this episode can be found at chamberchatpodcast dot com slash episode thirty four. But Norma, where can listeners connect with you if they have any questions about what we discussed today or how you're doing things at the Effingham County Chamber?
31:06.284 Norma Lansing
Our website is FM CountyCamber dot com. We'll start there. My email is is NLansing at FM CountyCamber dot com. Phone number two one seven three two four one four seven is how you would call me and reach me. Or you can call my cell phone to two one seven two six five eight four four.
31:28.128 Brandon Burton
And we will get that updated in the show notes as well. And I'm gonna try to put that flyer that you had referenced for the the employees. employees are members too. I'll I'll try to put that flyer in the show notes so people can see that and see the kind of messaging you're getting out with that. But again, thank you for spending time with us today and and congratulations on being selected as a finalist for Chamber of the Year. Great job.
31:56.142 Norma Lansing
Thank you so much. Appreciate the time.
32:00.694 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 33 — Murray/Calloway County Chamber 2019 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Michelle Bundren
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Michelle Bundren
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.192 Brandon Burton
This is a special edition of Chamber Chat Podcast as I begin a series of interviewing the finalist for Chamber of the Year for 2019. I hope you enjoyed this series, but first, the intro. 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.
00:30.286 Brandon Burton
Thank you for tuning in today for our tenth interview in our special series of the 2019 ACCE Chamber of the Year finalists. This is episode 33 of Chamber Chat Podcast, and I'm Brandon Burton. It is my goal to introduce you to people and to ideas so you can better serve your Chamber members and your community. If you're new to ChamberThat Podcast, please visit our Get Started page so you can learn more about what you can expect from the show and you can receive some valuable tips for some nondues revenue ideas to use at your chamber. And that address is ChamberTap Podcast.comslash start. Our guest today is Michelle Bundren. Michelle currently serves as the first female president and CEO of the Murray Calloway County Chamber in Murray, Kentucky. And she just brought home the title of ACCE Chamber of the Year for their category. She's been serving in the role of president and CEO for a little over a year, but has worked at this chamber for the past five years. Prior to her career at the Chamber, she was vice president of a private equity firm where she worked closely and managed overall operations for several small local businesses. She's been married for 15 years and has three elementary age children, ages 11, 7, and 5. Michelle has some great stuff to talk to us about today as she shares what landed the Murray-Calloway County Chamber, the title of Chamber of the Year for 2019. But first, let's take a quick moment to learn about our sponsor for this episode. Chambers are not considered for Chamber of the Year without having great programs and steady streams of nondues revenue. I want to introduce you to a great affinity program from Swipe It. In partnership with ChamberChat Podcast, Swipeit is one of the best credit card processors in the business. With the Swipe It Affinity program, you can save up to 40% on your credit card processing fees at the Chamber and help your member partners to do the same. Chambers who take advantage of the Swipe It Affinity program can add thousands of dollars to their non-dues revenue annually.
02:42.542 Brandon Burton
Please visit Chamberchatpodcast.com slash CC for more information and to request your complimentary cost savings analysis from the experts at Swipe It. The first 20 chambers to respond will qualify for free equipment to get set up. Again, visit Chamberchatpodcast.com slash CC to start swiping with Swipe It. All right, Michelle, welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. Please Yeah. Say hello to the audience and please share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
03:13.304 Michelle Bundren
For that of me.
03:21.718 Michelle Bundren
Sure. Hello everyone. glad to be on here. I appreciate the opportunity to share about our chamber. something interesting about myself. most people wouldn't know this about me, but I'm actually really competitive. I try to be really professional, but I always take those personality tests and competitive is the one, the top one that I always get. So I I guess I use that in things like this when, you know, competing, I guess, for like chamber of the year. I always wanna try to be the best. you know, on paper or an interview. So I work really, really hard. So, but yes, I'm very competitive, in different ways. But I think that that helps me in this role for sure.
04:11.848 Brandon Burton
Absolutely. I think being competitive makes for a great leader and obviously it worked out well with Chamber of the Year. Are there other things that you compete in to use that that character trait?
04:24.31 Michelle Bundren
Not really. I played sports growing up. So I think I got, you know, used that personality trait in that. But no, if I play games or something, you know, I'm I wanna win. So any like card card games or anything like that, but no, that's I mean mostly just my work ethic. You can tell I'm really competitive.
04:49.09 Brandon Burton
That's good. I'll make sure to never have my son play a game with you 'cause you guys are just buttheads. Yeah.
04:55.886 Michelle Bundren
Yes. I mean even in bowling or anything like that. I mean it's we're there to win. We're not there to have fun. That's right. That's right.
05:03.592 Brandon Burton
well, can you share with us a little bit about the Murray Calloway County Chamber? Maybe the size so we can all relate a little bit better to to your chamber and kind of where you guys sit.
05:16.696 Michelle Bundren
Sure, we're in the far western part of the state of Kentucky, and we have 600 members. We've really stayed steady at that number over the past several years. our attention rate is typically 90 percent or higher, at least for the past five years since I've been here. we have about a $300,000 budget, and we're in a college town. So we have Murray State University here in our community with about 10,000 students. I'm a graduate of Murray State University. I studied public relations and marketing. so people are familiar with me because I went to school here. And then our county is about thirty-eight thousand. so we say we represent about ten thousand employees here at our chamber.
06:06.392 Brandon Burton
Wow. that's a that's a good little footprint there. so congratulations, first of all, on on winning Chamber of the Year. That's awesome. And I'm sure it really helps with that that competitive nature of yours. But what what's making the Marie Calloway County Chamber stand out to not only be considered as a finalist, but to win Chamber of the Year? What are you guys doing there?
06:10.038 Michelle Bundren
Yeah. It is.
06:36.13 Michelle Bundren
Well, I think we've over the past five years, I think we've really stepped up our branding and have become, you know, identified in our community as a leader. not that we haven't been in the past, but we've updated our logos. Anything we publish or put out there has a brand. so when you're with all the static of marketing and things like that these days, we've really made and stepped up our game in terms of helping our brand really be seen in the community. so I think that's really helped us set the expectation high in terms of excellence. People know they can expect excellent, you know, events, excellent re representation through sponsorships because we have put so much into rebranding our organization. So that's really helped us for sure. When I first started five years ago, we had we took credit cards, but we had to like carry their credit card to the back of the office and swipe it. So just even updating old outdated technology and really putting ourselves in the forefront of, you know, here's the image of what the thing the things we're doing. Let's you know, let that be evident from our logos and every publication or everything that we do. I think that really helped us build a lot of value.
08:04.142 Brandon Burton
So I was gonna ask you with having the marketing background, how did that play into the branding, the rebranding of the chamber? What what insights were you able to bring and and incorporate in that process?
08:15.768 Michelle Bundren
Sure. yes, I'm a very creative person. So that marketing background really helped us to rebrand. we obviously put some money in the budget to help we partnered with a local business that a graphic designer to help us do a lot of the work. But I think having that creative mindset, we had sort of the vision for what we wanted. And we are able to do some of those things on our own. with different programs such as Canva. I've taught several classes to small businesses on that. It's a free or very affordable tool for small chambers or small businesses to help with their social media or any kind of publication. That's a great tool to use. And we use that some, but we did partner with a local graphic designer to create some of those, you know, new branding to really be competitive with larger chambers. you know, in terms of the way we look, maybe on social media or like I said, in our publications, you know, it makes us look like we are much more valuable than some of the outdated things we had published in the past.
09:24.738 Brandon Burton
That's right. So how have you seen this branding effort? How has that resonated with your members and the community there?
09:32.514 Michelle Bundren
You know, it's been really really good because people see us as a professional organization. and one of the synopsis that we submitted for our application was around our new Go Local Shared Brand Initiative. Get a drink of water really quick.
09:51.597 Brandon Burton
Yeah.
09:54.59 Michelle Bundren
so a lot of chambers and communities are doing go local campaigns, so it's not anything, you know, new or exciting. but we sort of well, through strategic planning with our board back in 2015, out of that came let's focus on small businesses. You know, sixty-five percent of our membership here are small businesses. And when I say small, I'm saying 10 employees or less. is how we sort of mention that. so we have a lot of unique small businesses here in our community. So we wanted to to highlight shop local, play local, eat local, and a few other type things. So we began researching from other chambers and other communities, like what are they doing across the country for this initiative? So we sort of took all the research and and developed our own shared brand, we created a skyline of our city when we worked with the local graphic designer. They're iconic buildings to our community and made a skyline. so no, it's not like the cool Nashville or some of the big city downtown building, but to us, they're iconic buildings of our university, our downtown courthouse and some buildings down there. and we really sort of put that idea of okay, let's really make this about our community. we we started the shop local, go local, eat local, and we launched it at our annual dinner. And this was back in 2016. We gave everyone a go local box at the dinner, which was about it 400 guests, is how big our dinners are. Everyone got a gift. Everything in it was a local item from honey to a, you know, An ink pen made here. and we launched it and said, Here's stickers that we want you to put in your windows, on your registers, whatever you can do to help launch this go local shared brand initiative. We've seen people put the stickers on their cars, we've seen people put it on their websites, in their advertisement. downtown, they're gonna paint our eat local building or
12:14.166 Michelle Bundren
our eat local logo on the side of a building downtown. So it's really been something our businesses can be a part of. And then that brand has really been noticed in the community. Our annual dinner was last week and to to really build on the idea of play local, we gave everyone in our that attended a play local deck of cards. So it was our play local logo. so we're just continually dropping things out there for our members around the Go Local Shared Brand Initiative. And that's really taken off really well.
12:50.274 Brandon Burton
So did deck of cards come with an invitation to play cards with you so you could beat everybody?
12:55.534 Michelle Bundren
Yes. I play anything and I learn really quickly. So yes. Yeah. That that night I went home and we were playing cards with my kids. So yes, I I welcome any competition anytime.
13:11.086 Brandon Burton
So what else do you guys have going on there at your chamber that's making you stand out?
13:17.528 Michelle Bundren
Sure. I think highlighting another thing that we submitted and really talked about is you know, we talk a lot about, you know, the Horizon initiatives and the political fragmentation and things like that. when a chamber gets the opportunity to work with your city officials, really cool things happen when that trust is there. so A couple years ago, we started a bris business friendliness initiative with we partnered with the city of Murray. they wanted us to help them make the process very simple for a business coming in. And they had us come in and when I say us, we partnered with Small Business Development Center here in our community and formed a committee of the chamber to really walk through that process. And we were able to connect the city. With one of our large manufacturers, and they were able to sit down and talk about some of the principles and things that they use to help make processes very simple. And so what it did at the end of our suggestions and research and giving them that data that we had collected, they were able to take that and save some businesses up to six months on some of their processes. They were able to eliminate a lot of the red tape that businesses found at City Hall. And so for a chamber, when you know local government comes to you and says, hey, help us with this problem, that's just really incredible opportunity for us to become problem solvers and that they would trust us with that process. And I think that built a lot of good rapport with our elected officials and our city council. That the chamber is still here to help them solve problems. and so moving forward, yes, we have new elected officials, but they remember that process. And I think they're quick to come to the chamber for us to help them solve any future problems going forward. So I think that has really helped set us apart as: hey, the chamber can help us solve business problems. They're help, they're here to help businesses you know, reduce the time they have to.
15:29.196 Michelle Bundren
to be waiting to get a building or get, you know, a license or whatever kind of document documentation or things they need at City Hall, they know that the chamber helped in that process. So that helps them invest in us moving forward as well because they see, you know, any future issue, they know we have the relationship with the city and can help them overcome some of those issues. So I think that was an initiative that really took off And has really helped us build those relationships with local government.
16:00.044 Brandon Burton
I love that the city came to you you know, recognizing the chamber as a problem solver and and organization that can bridge that gap for these businesses trying to get up and going. But I I'm glad you repeated that 'cause I was gonna have to ask, did the city really come to you? That's fantastic. Usually that's the problem is the city has all these requirements and they don't see it as a problem that it takes six months longer than it should to to open a new business. So I'm
16:16.866 Michelle Bundren
Yes.
16:28.204 Brandon Burton
I'm impressed with your the city to come and do that and recognize your role in the community as a chamber and to work together. That's a great, great partnership there. do you have any success stories that you've seen from that, from some businesses that have been able to get up and going quicker than what you would have seen in the past or anything like that that you could share?
16:50.546 Michelle Bundren
Sure. We actually published the survey results for members to see, you know, hey, here's the hiccups and they were able to give their feedback during that process. so they were sharing their headaches and pain points. yes, the city has implemented several things. They've implemented on their website, you know, here's how to do business, kind of a step by step guide, whereas before it was sort of blind leading the blind where they walk in and they're not sure who they talk to. so very very much a streamlined process now at the city where there's very specific who sort of takes the lead and who does what. you know, maybe they have some people who are cross-trained. but if not, yes, the process has has lessened in several different areas for businesses, you know, wanting to start or expand. I know the sign ordinance was a big issue that we had heard multiple times. I think our signed ordinance was created, I don't know, in the sixties or something and hadn't really been updated. So those were some pain points that our members in the business community had shared. And they are taking those steps now to help overcome those things. I don't have the specific, hey, this this specific thing saved time, but I know some of the processes saved businesses six months. You know, maybe I think they had a committee meeting every like Two months and now they'll call special meetings every month if needed to help a businesses get started quicker. So they have identified those pain points and helped at every level that I've seen. It's not perfect, obviously we're getting there, but that process really helped them identify how they can make that process better. and yes, it has saved some businesses six weeks. Or maybe they do all their paperwork in one visit versus over the course of three months. So it it really as is a success story of a partnership between the chamber and the city.
18:55.214 Brandon Burton
So identifying the pain points is huge. And I'm glad you pointed that out. I have you guys been able to see or I guess is there a plan to maybe revisit pain points in the future and see if some of those pain points are the same or see what the new pain points are? How how are you guys going about collecting data going forward?
19:17.608 Michelle Bundren
Yes, we would love we have a new council and a new mayor. So it it turns over a little bit, but they are familiar with the effort that we had. and so we are constantly in that conversation with them and the small business development center here in our community. anytime we feel, you know, like there may be a next step or next initiative. They are willing to work with us on that. I think one issue we've helped tackle here recently, mostly with our Murray Main Street downtown, is the food truck ordinances. we are main we really help support the Main Street in that process. and so I think just hearing the chamber's voice and some of those things, one businesses here that we're helping advocate for them at that level. but then where val our opinion is valued at s the city. so I think they're open for any future partnerships. If you know through our next membership survey, if if some pain points come up, we would definitely help identify those. We just have had sort of a shift in leadership in our community and haven't had really the opportunity to have that conversation in the past year. But I think they would be more than open to having it moving forward.
20:42.904 Brandon Burton
So I have to share just a really quick story that I'd heard just this week. Sure. Some some friends of ours. They their son is getting ready to go to college. And his parents like, you need to get a job, you need to save some money. And he's, you know, they told him every day you need to apply to three different places. Well, in the meantime, he decided to start earning money. He wanted to play his guitar outside of the city library and just try to earn some money, you know, while he's waiting to get a job. So He went to City Hall to try to, you know, see if he needs a permit or what he needs to do to be able to get permission to do this. And they send him to another department, another department. You need to go to the police department. So finally he gets to the police department and they say, You don't need a permit. You just go it's that's some of the the complication with trying I mean, that's a very small business, right? Trying to get started. Yes. But just the runaround and the frustration of trying to get started. And I know every city's different, but I'm glad to see that that kind of consensus and trying to to get a focal point to make things easier.
21:45.418 Michelle Bundren
It is. And we're trying to redo our website. we're actually doing that this fall. and and one thing we're wanting to put on there is, you know, so you're interested in starting a business, here's the steps and really help them have all the information they need before they take the next steps to go to City Hall. you know, everything is sort of there for them and just our website would be that resource for them. Cause it is a headache when you have to go to this place and this place and you don't know you know, exactly the process, but we're trying to step ahead of everyone and and be that resource for people because we want them to be able to build a business quickly and start quickly because that means people are hired quickly, they're living here, working here, their families are in our schools. So we want to help make the process really quick for people.
22:35.072 Brandon Burton
Yeah. I've seen a lot of chambers and you guys maybe have this too, like with a a publication, a relocation guide or something would tell for new residents this is how you get started. This is where you go to turn on power. This is the phone phone companies, cable companies, you know, trash, utilities, all that. So new residents can get started. But businesses could use that hand holding too as they're trying to get going. And maybe they haven't always been an entrepreneur or a small business owner, but they're coming out of the corporate field. And just need to know where to get started. So I think that's a a great great focus that you guys have going on there. So good job. So I know you guys have some some workforce conversations there at at your chamber that you guys are focused on right now too, right?
23:12.15 Michelle Bundren
Thank you.
23:23.99 Michelle Bundren
We do. we have started a group of business leaders have come together and really the chamber's been a part of that conversation of how can we bridge education and businesses in the chamber to to really tackle some of the workforce issues that every single community is having right now. You know, with the population shift of baby boomers and millennials. you know, it just some jobs, you know, are not or some companies can't grow because they can't find the labor. You know, all the all the issues that I think every community has. so our group has really come together, the chamber's really helping bring in some of the research. and you know to help tackle some of these issues. So one thing that we're helping start is what we're calling Murray Works. it's a program again that bridges education. Our superintendents, our principals are in the conversation, our business business communities in the conversation. We have several leaders or company owners or managers. in that conversation talking about how can we help education and grow our future workforce in primarily essential skills. Some of these basic skills that they need, you know, I know a lot of people graduate from college and they have a degree, but maybe they don't have the soft skills to be an effective employee in a future job. So we're looking at some different solutions. One that we're working on now is hiring someone part-time to run a program where businesses can come into the schools and help give them some type of certification. they've had experience or exposure to these certain career paths and these certain skills and now they have this certification. A lot of that is state mandated. There's a new piece of legislation that says every high schooler must graduate with this type of certification. So this group has really stepped up
25:41.058 Michelle Bundren
To help be a partner with the schools and help them, you know, check the box off in this area. So it's kind of a slow start because it takes a while to gather the research and the data. and none of it's cheap in terms of, you know, what careers are there for in the region for students in the future, and how can we help educate them on those career paths, what education path it may be, or maybe it's not secondary education, maybe it's a trade. and you can make this much money and this is the path. so that's sort of some of the things we're doing and the conversations we're a part of right now and helping bring together education and businesses and really connect the two and then be the the voice piece for it for that process. so I I'm looking forward to how it goes. It's very early stages, so I don't have a lot of like, here's what we've accomplished. But that's sort of the process and the conversation we're a part of now and moving forward and helping identify some of those needs.
26:43.34 Brandon Burton
Yeah, so as I've been doing these Chamber of the Year finalist interview series, I as I mentioned earlier in this interview, this is the tenth interview of the series, ten out of twelve. And almost every chamber's had some sort of workforce, you know, initiative or talent initiative to develop that future workforce. I mean, it's a huge need in just about every community, but you're absolutely right with the the need to be able to gain some kind of experience because they may graduate, they may get some kind of a a certificate or diploma or something, but then they try to enter the workforce. And almost every job requires some sort of experience, or they would like to see some sort of experience to set those put those job candidates above somebody else. So anyway that you're able to integrate that into your the high school level and trying to get these graduating students or you know juniors and seniors to get some of that experience is fantastic and we'll just really give them a boost, I think, as they go to enter the workforce. So are there other things that you're excited about that you want to share with us that you have going on at your chamber right now?
28:00.034 Michelle Bundren
There's always something going on at our channel. That's right. we have well always, you know, people are always impressed with the fact we have two full time employees and a part time employee here. doing the different, you know, things that we do. and and having six hundred members. I think, you know, we average two hundred or three hundred members apiece and and full time employees. So we one thing, you know, we we definitely build relationships, but one thing we really got to talk about in our interview for Chamber of the Air was diversifying our board. and that has really been beneficial for us. in terms of age. Half of our board is under forty now. we used to have when I started here five years ago we had four women, s twelve men, no, s fourteen men. And now we've really started chipping away at that to where it's almost fifty fifty. and we have started diversifying by segment, you know, finance, accounting or, you know, manufacturing. We try to re bring in some representation from all across, you know, our segments of of businesses. And one thing we just recruited a board member who owns an international business and she's an Asian American woman. So we're really excited to have her influence on the board. So I think that's really been beneficial to us in discussing or planning for the chamber to bring in all those different perspectives into s you know, initiatives we take forward because it's a collaborative effort and very representative of our community at large. So I would highly recommend every community or every chamber to look at doing that. instead of recruiting maybe who you want or who you like. To really try to recruit a diverse group of people.
30:04.704 Brandon Burton
I I love the idea of bringing in the different perspectives from all these different backgrounds by diversifying the board. I've seen even with other committees and things as it as it is diversified to actually call on some of the maybe more underserved of the the diversity to have them speak up first. So they're not feeling like they're being railroaded by what the the typical, you know, power structure would be in in that kind of a setting. But to let them have one of the first voices at the table and see how that changes the perspective of everybody else. I'd I'd love just the idea of of having those those different perspectives from gender and age and different industry backgrounds. It it can't do anything but help. That that sounds like a a great initiative to be pushing behind. Michelle, from I know we need to start wrapping things up here, but I wanted to to ask you if you can kind of summarize. from what you've shared with us today and and from your experience, what is one action item that listeners can do to level up their game at their chamber?
31:13.47 Michelle Bundren
in terms of everything, you know, I think one thing that's really helped us over the years is to listen to the data, listen to your members. it's all relational. and then be willing to make any changes to programming, to anything, initiatives, maybe taking away some things you're doing and creating new things. I think listening and actually making changes shows that you're willing to adapt to the ch you know, the ever evolving economy and and the way things are. I think we've been able to do that and you know, members really respect that. So I guess my advice or action item would just be to be engaged and to really listen to so that you're serving members' wants and needs. not what you think they want or need or what you can maybe you don't want to change some of the programming 'cause it's easy. so that would definitely be a suggestion is to listen and be willing to make changes.
32:22.912 Brandon Burton
I love it. I love it. Yeah, the question I I like to ask everybody that I have on the show is as we look to the future, how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose?
32:35.416 Michelle Bundren
Well, always hear a lot of people say or fear that chambers are becoming ir irrelevant. And I honestly, as a millennial myself, I believe that chambers are more important, and relevant than ever. I think that we play an essential role in bringing people together, you know, that collaborative work, you know, despite politics or despite different things, you know, we can bring people together with common interests. and really we changed our mission statement last year to serve our members to enhance our community. You know, everything we do is a community focus. We want to make this a place where people enjoy living, working, playing. and so I think we all have that common interest and the chambers have the ability to bring people together. to accomplish things and really I call us the connectors. We can really connect people together and a lot of times then we can get out of the way, which I like. too. but I really feel, you know, membership type organizations, I feel like are popular and you know, I think about Netflix or things like that. And it's just, you know, you join and you get, you know, things out of it. And but I think again, Listening, being able to make changes makes you really evaluate your return on investment, which people are looking for all the time. And you know, for us it's more relational, so vr less transactional. So we have the ability to take the things we're exposed to, events, networking, conferences, different things that we go to, we are educating ourselves constantly on the shifts and our communities and we can take that knowledge and bring it into conversations with our board, with, you know, certain members, to help really affect change. I just actually graduated from IOM this past or this summer. In one of thank you. In one of the discussions during
34:40.024 Brandon Burton
Congratulations.
34:46.238 Michelle Bundren
this past year or this fourth year was, you know, how relevant are chambers and all of us left saying, you know, we feel like we can really be the game changers in our community by being that persistent voice of positive change in our community to bring people together. So I feel that the role of chambers moving forward is more critical than ever.
35:11.404 Brandon Burton
I love the idea of serving the members to enhance the community. I think that that sums it all up. That's perfect.
35:18.934 Michelle Bundren
Our last yes, our last mission was about four sentences and nobody could repeat it. So we were very excited to change that so that everybody on the board knew knew how to communicate it.
35:30.958 Brandon Burton
That's right. Makes that vision a whole lot more clear. Well, Michelle, I wanted to thank you for spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. And of course, thank everybody out there who's listening and and participating in the show. The show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode thirty-three. Michelle, where can listeners connect with you if they have any questions about what we discussed today or
35:33.941 Michelle Bundren
Yes.
35:58.72 Brandon Burton
how you're doing things at the Murray Calloway County Chamber.
36:02.104 Michelle Bundren
Sure, you can find us on all social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all those. But if people want to email me, Michelle with two L's at my Murray dot com, or they can call two seven zero seven five three five one seven one.
36:18.446 Brandon Burton
Right. We will get that in the show notes for everybody to be able to connect with you. Again, thank you, Michelle, and congratulations again on Chamber of the Year.
36:27.704 Michelle Bundren
Thank you. Or still on Cloud Nine about it.
36:30.893 Brandon Burton
Yeah.
36:35.104 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 32 — Salt Lake Chamber 2019 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Derek Miller
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Derek Miller
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.226 Brandon Burton
This is a special edition of Chamber Chat Podcast as I begin a series of interviewing the finalist for Chamber of the Year for 2019. I hope you enjoyed this series, but first, the intro. 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.
00:29.742 Brandon Burton
Thank you for tuning in today for our ninth interview in our special series of the 2019 ACCE Chamber of the Year Finalists. This is episode 32 of Chamber Chat Podcast, and I'm your host, Brandon Burton. It is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. If you're new to Chamber Chat Podcast, please visit Chamberchat Podcast.com slash start. Where you can learn more about what you can expect from the show and you can also receive some valuable tips for some non-dues revenue ideas that you can use at your chamber. Again, that's ChamberChat Podcast.com/slash start. And before we jump into the show today, let's quick take just a quick moment to learn about our sponsor for this episode. Chambers are not considered for chamber of the year without having great programs and steady streams of non-dues revenue. I want to introduce you to a great affinity program. From Swipe It. In partnership with Chamber Chat Podcast, Swipe It is one of the best credit card processors in the business. With the Swipe It Affinity program, you can save up to 40% on your credit card processing fees at the Chamber and help your member partners to do the same. Chambers who take advantage of the Swipe It Affinity program can add thousands of dollars to their non-dues revenue annually. Please visit Chamberchatpodcast.com slash C C for more information and to request your complimentary cost savings analysis from the experts at Swipe It. The first 20 chambers to respond will qualify for free equipment to get set up. Again, visit Chamberchatpodcast.com slash CC to start swiping with Swipe It. Alright, and we are back. Our guest today is Derek Miller. Who's the president and CEO of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce in Utah? In this role, Derek leads the business community in advocating and leading Utah's continued economic prosperity. Derek also serves as chairman of the Inland Port Authority, which is leading development of a global trade hub to serve the Western United States. Previously, Derek served as the president and CEO of the World Trade Center, Utah.
02:54.082 Brandon Burton
Helping to promote prosperity across the state by attracting investment and increasing exports. He also served as chief of staff to Governor Herbert and as a managing director in the Governor's Office of Economic Development for Governor Huntsman. Recognizing his leadership, Governor Herbert lauded Derrick as an architect of economic opportunity and innovation, and instrumental in transforming Utah into one of the most competitive and fastest growing economies in the country. Derek began his career in Washington, D.C. as a management consultant with Arthur Anderson and as legal counsel in the U.S. House of Representatives. He's a graduate from the J. Rubin Clark School and holds a Master of Public Administration from the Romney Institute of Public Management at Brigham Young University. Derek and his wife Laura live in Salt Lake City with their three children. They enjoy spending time together exploring Utah's countless natural wonders. Derek, welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. Please say hello to the audience and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
04:05.496 Derek Miller
Brandon, thank you for the invitation to be on the podcast. I'm excited to join you. you're you're going right off the bat with the hardest question of all. I thought you were gonna say tell us something about you, not something interesting. Qualifying word that's really thrown me here. I I thank you for reading that introduction. It it made me tired just thinking about all the things that I've been doing. But something unique about me would be I've never once
04:18.114 Brandon Burton
Interesting.
04:34.936 Derek Miller
put a USB chord in the right direction the first time. I keep thinking I it's a fifty fifty chance that somehow I'm batting zero in you know how you you know what I'm talking about, right? Like a USB chord. It has to fit in right w one way and I I I've never been able to do it the right way the first
04:54.102 Brandon Burton
It's a law of physics. Yeah, that you're guaranteed to go the wrong way with the USB cords, so
04:58.646 Derek Miller
I guess. Well I hope it's I hope it's a law of physics instead of just a personal defect.
05:04.812 Brandon Burton
That's good though. Can you share with us a little bit about the size of the Salt Lake Chamber so we can all relate a little bit better to the chamber and and what all you guys have going on there?
05:16.41 Derek Miller
probably the first thing I oughta share is that the Salt Lake Chamber is capital city in name, but statewide in our reach, our scope, and most importantly our mission. we d we act as the statewide chamber for the state of Utah. our founding goes back it actually predates Utah as a state. there are only three organizations in the state of Utah. currently existing that can claim that and the chamber is one of them. So we've been around for a long time as far as size goes, we we count our members in the thousands, not the hundreds. we've got members from all twenty nine of our counties across the entire state of Utah and it's a wonderful job to have. We're we're just north of about eight million dollars as a budget.
06:13.184 Brandon Burton
Wow. That is amazing to think of the Salt Lake Chamber predates the state of Utah as a state. That
06:20.194 Derek Miller
We just celebrated our hundred and thirtieth year anniversary. Wow of just last year. And so it's something we're not just proud of, but it's something that we actually take as a as a responsibility, standing upon the shoulders of great men and women, business leaders and community leaders that preceded us.
06:41.108 Brandon Burton
Right. Was there any kind of celebration for that or is there
06:44.042 Derek Miller
absolutely. Yeah, we we had a a great grand celebration. In fact we did something really fun. We went over to the original Commerce Building, which is just across the street from our offices today. so one of those original business historic business buildings in downtown Salt Lake City and there was put i in the corner of that building a time capsule and so one of the fun things we did was open that time capsule.
07:10.126 Brandon Burton
That is cool. What okay. So what did you find in the time capsule? I'm sure there was
07:15.576 Derek Miller
Really hoping there were either gonna be some bear bonds or maybe some gold coins in there. you know, we're thinking probably thinking too much about Indiana Jones, but you know, some of it we found a Bible in there that was pretty cool. We we found the original directory or roster of members, the founding members of what then was called the Commerce Club. And you know, it's just it's really interesting to think about the history, not just the history of the Salt Lake Chamber, but the history of the founding of Utah and and the West.
07:51.158 Brandon Burton
That is pretty neat. Lots of good history there. Awesome. So huh. You just shared some pretty cool things that make the Salt Lake Chamber stand out. But specifically in regards to being considered as a finalist for Chamber of the Year, what kind of things do you currently have going on, in your opinion, that are are making you stand out?
08:13.132 Derek Miller
Well, first of all, I should just say how honored we are to to be one of those finalists to be considered as a chamber of the year. It it is a testament to the men and women who work at the Salt Lake Chamber and their dedication to building Utah into a a great place for business as well as a high quality of life. And The team has done that. your listeners may or may not be aware that w the state of Utah is now going into its third year as the fastest growing economy in the United States of America. So l you know, little old Utah, located somewhere in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, that probably a lot of people that live on the coast couldn't find on a map, we're the square state with a bite out of the top of it, in case you're wondering.
09:07.363 Brandon Burton
That's right.
09:09.478 Derek Miller
but you know, for for for Utah to be the fastest growing economy in in the nation, as well as one of the fastest growings in in states in population, and and with a tremendous quality of life. That's not to say we're without our challenges, which I'm sure we'll talk about during this podcast, but it's something that we're not only proud of, but that we keep as our focus every single day here at the chamber. So I can dive in just to a couple of things specifically. You asked the question, what sets the Salt Lake Chamber apart? Yeah. And you know, that's a tough question because I'm not sure that anything I could say would make us unique. There's so many wonderful things about chambers around the country. but I I can tell you what we probably all have in common and that is on a constant basis thinking about how we add value to our members. And then because every state and every community is different, the answer to that question will be different. And what I think the answer to the question for us here in Utah and the Salt Lake Chamber comes down to a couple of things. The first one is something that we created in the last few months, and that is a foundation here at the Salt Lake Chamber. that's a fi acts as a five one C three charitable foundation. The reason that we created the foundation which we call Utah Community Builders is that we have found with our members a a strong and increasing desire to impact social welfare, to have an influence for good on community issues that you wouldn't traditionally think as business issues. let me be specific. you you will always have what I call foundational business issues of transportation, education, taxation, regulation. those will not change, at least not in my lifetime. But we find our members and the business community at large interested and engaged in a number of other community issues that have a business connection. That could include air quality, immigration,
11:31.946 Derek Miller
upward mobility, social mobility, intergenerational poverty, behavioral and mental health. And we created a foundation and created a board to lead that foundation at the Salt Lake Chamber specifically to focus on those issues.
11:50.046 Brandon Burton
Okay. So that's I assume there was some kind of feedback from the community that showed a desire or a need to establish a a foundation for that. What what was the root to say, you know, let's let's form this foundation and with this purpose?
12:07.842 Derek Miller
Probably a couple of things, Brandon. the first one being I think a rise in social awareness and consciousness by corporations, by businesses, large and small. they're obviously focused on being successful in the marketplace. They're focused on being able to provide predictable employment, jobs to their employees, to be able to grow, provide great products. but they're interested in in more than just that. They're interested in being participants in their communities, good citizens of their state. And I think it's more important than ever, and our members certainly agree that business should be looked at as a source and a partner for solutions. Often a business l is looked at for you know either personal or political reasons as a source of problems. Sometimes it's even held up as a scapegoat. for social problems and and nothing could be further from the truth. Our businesses, businesses around the country, they want to be part of the solution. And that was the one reason for the creation of our foundation. And the second reason was that we find more and more especially within the technology, the IT community, and with a rising generation of business leaders that they're so busy in in what they do, they have limited time for you know what you would call traditional networking. In addition to that, traditional networking for many of them is no longer a necessity because they have many other ways to connect professionally. And so we found that if with a lot in this group when we ask them if they want to become a member of the chamber Sometimes they have a false notion about what that means. They think, well, that's a lunch bunch group. And this was a way for us to refocus the conversation about chamber membership away from those misperceptions and have it be more initiative based. So where we were actually talking about instead of saying, Do you want to become a member of the chamber? We were saying
14:28.878 Derek Miller
Do you want to be involved in addressing air quality? Would you help us in addressing social mobility? Would you help us in addressing diversity and inclusion? And when we put it in those very real, proactive, engaged terms, we got a lot better response.
14:50.126 Brandon Burton
That makes perfect sense to me. It's about getting the right branding across to the these new generations that are coming through and trying to get on the same page as them and and resonate with them. It is. That's great. So I have to ask, with Utah being the fastest growing economy in the nation, what's driving it?
15:12.098 Derek Miller
Well, I think it's a sound business environment. businesses crave two things. they crave stability and they crave predictability. And that's what Utah has to offer and I hasten to add that that doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't happen by coincidence or happenstance. We've got a partnership with the Salt Lake Chamber and our local governments, our state government. very strong relationships with our federal congressional delegation and we work hand in hand to make sure that Utah is a fertile field for business and job creation. it's so th that's the direct result of that i to think that that you are going to grow jobs or grow your economy without that kind of intentional planning. and hard work is would be like thinking that a garden is gonna spring up in your backyard overnight by accident. I mean it just it's it's absurd to think that would happen. It's equally absurd to think that having a strong business environment would happen by accident. I I have to say that even success brings its own set of challenges though. And primarily in Utah our set of challenges are related to our growth. our Our fast growing economy, our fast growing population is bringing with it challenges in transportation, it's bringing with it challenges in water. we are a high mountain desert in Utah and water is our most limiting factor. And it's bringing challenges as it relates to quality of li maintaining our quality of life specifically around housing issues. Housing affordability is a huge issue. and something that the chamber has been actively in involved in.
17:10.144 Brandon Burton
Yeah. I know I actually have a brother that lives in Utah who's in the market looking for a new house and it's
17:18.657 Derek Miller
Well I don't envy him. It's it's tough. There's not there's not a lot of available I mean, they're building like crazy, but our the chambers involvement in this started with a study that we commissioned with one of our partners at the University of Utah, an or an institution called the Kem Gardner Policy Institute. And they they do all kinds of demographic studies, and so we went to them and asked them to take a close look at the housing market in Utah and they they found a disturbing trend and that is that our housing prices are increasing at a rate that if we cannot get ahead of it in the next ten to fifteen years we will find ourselves in a market similar to San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Seattle, all wonderful places, but all struggling with housing affordability issues. And then the the data also showed us that although we're we're building a lot, it still is not keeping up with the demand to the extent that for the first time in our state's history, we have more households to the tune of forty thousand four zero thousand households more than we have housing units.
18:32.833 Brandon Burton
Wow. So so what do you do? How do you well solve that? Forty thousand house. I mean, that's a ton.
18:43.54 Derek Miller
As we followed the root of the problem where where this data led us was to practices at a local government level that were making it difficult for building of homes at a rate that was necessary. And that can either be through zoning, permitting size of lots that were being required. there was a time Your your brother, based on his experience here in Utah, there was a time in our population center where a community could say, Hey, if you want to have multifamily housing, that's great, but just not in our city, move down the road. that time has passed. and and one of the the main things that we've been involved in as a chamber is to visit every single city within our three most populous counties to visit every single city, mayor and city council, to share the data with them, to talk with them about practices that they could put into place in order to have a a good quality of life, not just for their current citizens, but for their next generation of citizens.
20:02.638 Brandon Burton
Yeah. Well, I would think some of these cities would want to jump on that if they could be and they have attracts.
20:09.132 Derek Miller
Yeah. Yeah. We see some cool things already. Sorry, go ahead, Brent.
20:11.854 Brandon Burton
Yeah, I was going No, go ahead. I'm sorry.
20:17.366 Derek Miller
I was just gonna say I we see some cool things already happening. one of the smart things that our city planners did years ago was to put in light rail and commuter rail along the area that we call the Wasatch Front. The Wasatch Front r refers to the Wasatch Mountain Range and the front of of it is the literally the front of those Wasatch Mountains where Salt Lake City is located. That range extends along an eighty mile corridor with Salt Lake City being right in the middle of it, forty miles to the south and forty miles to the north, and then not very wide, only about ten miles wide because we've got a big salt lake. Hence the name of the city, as well as a a big lake in Utah Valley to the south of Salt Lake. And so this is a corridor that is extremely populous, a large metropolitan area. 85% of the the population in the state of Utah lives i along this 80 mile corridor. And thankfully for us, because of visionary leaders, we have commuter rail that extends along the Was Edge front. And the reason I mention it related to housing is because that gives us now the opportunity to start looking at transit-oriented developments, and you're seeing it happen already. with multifamily housing, multi use developments, including residential, commercial and retail being built around the stops of this commuter rail. So that's a positive thing for sure in our community.
21:51.064 Brandon Burton
Wow. Yeah, you know, initially I was gonna ask the question with being one of the fastest grow or being the fastest growing economy in the nation, it it sounds like things are great there. So what kind of challenges could you possibly have? But it's all that that infrastructure that you need to support the growth that how are you guys addressing the water issue with the limited resource?
22:13.076 Derek Miller
Well, it's all about conservation. And we implemented in the chamber working very closely with the governor and our state legislature what we call a slow the flow campaign several years ago. it's had a tremendous impact. We we're only going to get what Mother Nature gives us every year and and and then we're only able to keep what we can in the reservoirs that have been built. They're not gonna be building any more reservoirs anytime soon. So that we know what what our what we're gonna get and we just have to be better stewards of it, better users of that water. And so far we're starting to bend the curve, which is a good thing.
22:55.31 Brandon Burton
That's great. But I know we need to start wrapping up here. So I I had a couple of questions here that I wanted to to ask you. Based on what we've talked about today and what you have going on there in the the Salt Lake Chamber, can you kind of summarize maybe one action item that listeners can do at their chamber to to lift their chamber up to the next level?
23:18.988 Derek Miller
Well, I guess I'm Brandon, I'm gonna go back to what I was talking about with the foundation and that is to if you're not already doing it, my recommendation on an action item would be to get a group together of really civic minded business leaders and talk about creating an outlet through the chamber for this social awareness and desire for social impact. And it it has so many benefits, not the least of which course is actually helping to improve those social challenges by bringing business solutions into play. But then it also just I think sets a business in the appropriate light as being a partner for solutions to problems and countering the false narrative that that they're a cause of of problems.
24:10.331 Brandon Burton
So I appreciate that. As you were answering that question, I was thinking with you guys being more of a statewide chamber, as you have this foundation, are are the members meeting face to face or virtually, or do they all come together to as they get these action plans together for the foundation?
24:28.586 Derek Miller
Yeah, great question. As I mentioned, we've got this eighty mile corridor, so luckily for us, they can we can get together pretty easily. But we do have many partners and members and constituencies that are out in the rural parts of Utah. And so I'm on the road a lot. I go out and I visit our local chambers of commerce. we have quarterly gatherings of an association of chambers at the Salt Lake Chamber. administers an organization that we administer and staff and so through those meetings as well as just being out on the road, but please understand I'm not complaining, Utah is a beautiful state. So as much as I can get out on the road and visit different parts of our state, i I feel blessed to do so.
25:15.386 Brandon Burton
Beat's looking at a computer screen, that's for sure. Yep. So th the last question I had for you is I asked this to everybody I have on the show is as we look to the future, how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose?
25:29.686 Derek Miller
Well, I look to first to our past and and as I mentioned we celebrated our hundred and thirty year anniversary. the same desire for a group to come together a hundred and thirty years ago is the same need and desire today and into the future, and I would use the phrase common ground. What a chamber of commerce does is to provide common ground. We are unique and different from a traditional business association. We're not just looking out for the needs of one industry, certainly not the needs over of one industry over another, for businesses, for elected officials, for educational professionals, at all levels to be able to come together at a chamber of commerce where problems can be discussed. where plans can be devised, where problems can can be solved through common ground and collaboration. That is the value of a chamber of commerce. What a great mission to be involved in.
26:36.2 Brandon Burton
Absolutely. Yeah. Perfectly said. Derek, I wanna to thank you for spending some time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast and thank everybody who's out there listening and tuning in and being a part of the show. The show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchatpodcast dot com slash episode thirty two. And Derek, I wanted to ask where can listeners connect with you if they have any questions about what was discussed today or how you're doing things at the Salt Lake Chamber?
27:04.622 Derek Miller
Please feel free to my email address is D Miller at sl chamber dot com and my phone number is eight one three eight five zero seven three. I'd love to hear from any of your listeners.
27:20.77 Brandon Burton
That's perfect. We will put that in the show notes so they can get in contact with you. But I will let you go and wish you the best of luck with the chamber of the year.
27:31.928 Derek Miller
Thanks, Brandon.
27:36.8 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 31 — Wooster Area Chamber 2019 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Justin Starlin
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Justin Starlin
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.192 Brandon Burton
This is a special edition of Chamber Chat Podcast as I begin a series of interviewing the finalist for Chamber of the Year for 2019. I hope you enjoyed this series, but first, the intro. 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.
00:29.58 Brandon Burton
Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. This is our eighth interview in our special series of 2019 ACCE Chamber of the Year finalists. This is episode 31 of Chamber Chat Podcast, and I'm your host, Brandon Burton. It is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your Chamber members and your community. If you're new to Chamber Chat Podcast, please visit Chamberchat Podcast.com/slash start. To learn more about what you can expect from the show and you can receive some valuable tips for some non-dues revenue ideas that you can implement at your chamber. Again, that's chamberchatpodcast.com/slash start. And before we get into the episode today, let's take just a brief moment to hear about our sponsor for this episode. Chambers are not considered for chamber of the year without having great programs and steady streams of non-dues revenue. I want to introduce you to a great affinity program. From Swipe It. In partnership with ChamberChat Podcast, Swipe It is one of the best credit card processors in the business. With the Swipeit Affinity program, you can save up to 40% on your credit card processing fees at the Chamber and help your member partners to do the same. Chambers who take advantage of the Swipe It Affinity program can add thousands of dollars to their non-dues revenue annually. Please visit Chamberchatpodcast dot com slash CC for more information and to request your complimentary cost savings analysis from the experts at Swipeit. The first twenty chambers to respond will qualify for free equipment to get set up. Again, visit ChamberchatPodcast.com slash C C to start swiping with Swipeit. All right, our guest today is Justin Starlin. President of the Wooster Area Chamber of Commerce in Ohio. Justin has more than 15 years of experience in economic and community development, city administration and chamber executive leadership, in which he has grown professionally by assuming positions such as economic development coordinator, community development director, co-city manager, and most recently president of the Wooster Chamber of Commerce.
02:51.694 Brandon Burton
Throughout his career, he's assumed a leadership role in projects and initiatives ranging from large development projects such as LEED for the Daisy brand's establishment of a manufacturing facility in Wooster to smaller projects such as the development of the state of Ohio's initial downtown D5L liquor license language and implementation. Beginning his career as a recognized economic development professional at the city of Wooster for nearly 10 years. Justin transitioned to a leadership role at the Wooster Area Chamber of Commerce. Throughout his career, Justin has been recognized as an innovator and a collaborator as he focuses on results opposed to discussion and bridges rather than walls. Justin is an active member of the Ohio Economic Development and the Chamber of Commerce Executives of Ohio, where he was named the prestigious 2018 Professional of the Year. He is a faithful supporter of community organizations and projects, not only in his professional life, but in his personal life as well, where he sits on various community and regional boards related to economic development, chamber leadership, and service club activities. Justin, welcome to the show. Please say hello to the chamber chat audience and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
04:12.898 Justin Starlin
Yeah, Brandon, thanks for the opportunity to to join you today and to thanks to all the listeners today. a couple of interesting things about kind of Wooster and myself is that yeah, Brandon, you hit on it and have a great background in economic development for ten years prior to join joining the chamber. Had the opportunity to be active in a small town. Wooster is about twenty eight thousand people. And I know when they gave me the job of economic development. Coordinator when I was twenty two and fresh out of college, Brandon. I didn't quite know what economic development was, to be honest with you. But for the last ten years, having the opportunity to be in a kind of an economic development role and transitioning over to the the chamber president here for the last seven years has really allowed me to to be more active in the community. And kind of bring some of that economic development knowledge to directly to to the chamber the last seven years has been beneficial for us. So
05:14.252 Brandon Burton
That's great. I'm sure it's benefiting the community and and you're learning along the way, you know, from that twenty-two year old college graduate to to where you are now. Can you share with us you mentioned the the size of population of the of Wooster, but how about the the chamber itself and and kind of the area just so we can kind of better relate to your chamber.
05:23.352 Justin Starlin
Absolutely.
05:34.23 Justin Starlin
For little bit. Yeah, to give you kind of a sense as to where Wooster, Ohio is, we are an hour south of Cleveland, Ohio, about an hour and a half north of the Columbus market as well. our sat our town is growing a little bit, but we're about 29,000 people in population, and we serve a a a county that is about 115,000 in population. Overall, pretty rural. but in the in the the center of town here in in Wooster, which is the county seat, Brandon, have national manufacturers and companies here that are are well known through throughout the nation. In Daisy brand, sour cream. If you if you eat sour cream then you are in your east of the Mississippi, every of every bit of that is made here in Wooster. Yeah, yep, yep, exactly. That's our little jingle here around town. also
06:22.848 Brandon Burton
A dollop of daisy, right?
06:29.678 Justin Starlin
Gojo Industries. we're very close to the Smucker Company as as well. it is just eight miles west of us. if you know anything about jam and smokers, have an idea as to where we're at.
06:40.556 Brandon Burton
That's right. Very good. So that that does help give us an idea a little bit more about your area. That's awesome.
06:48.428 Justin Starlin
Awesome. And from a chamber perspective, you know, we are pushing we hover right around seven hundred members and we have a staff of four here. and a budget's pushed around right around half a million dollars for the year to kind of give you an idea as to the the shape of our and size of our chamber.
07:09.26 Brandon Burton
Yeah, that's perfect. So if from your point of view, what is making you guys stand out there at the Wooster Chamber to be considered as a finalist for Chamber of the Year?
07:21.282 Justin Starlin
Yeah, you know, when we when we are filling out the the information to ACC, I think one thing that separates our chamber from from some others is that we take it an extremely proactive role in economic development and community development. And so when we talk about that, we are very active and that means when people come in and talk about either a project, a concept, We're grabbing them, bringing them in, and we're really trying to walk them through the process of finding property in the community, to talking about incentives that are available locally, then to also to partner up with philanthropists that may be interested in investing in their project. And I think what's interesting, Brandon, is we also have a county economic development agency. So we are we are quick to bring them into the mix. But I think that when you have a network of seven hundred members, you have a board, our board is twenty-five members big. we are able to use some of the expertise that we have here at the chamber to bring a value add to that process. And we've done a really good job of s securing some projects and and really being the leaders in in the community in in that in those endeavors. And it it's paid off for us.
08:27.512 Brandon Burton
Wow. Yeah.
08:47.786 Justin Starlin
additionally, we are you know, chambers have some have a reputation of being more of a like a cheer cheerleader organization. you know, the the general ribbon cutting and celebration of a business or business after hours and networking component. And while that's important to to the Wooster Chamber, we go a little bit further and w we like to have boots on the ground and really be down Down in the ditches in in the projects and in the community. So from economic development or to to active projects like we have a manufacturing day, Brandon, that truly aims to address workforce development issues. And I'm sure that many of your listeners have talked about workforce development issues in their community. And as an example, the Wooster Chamber. We our manufacturing day is is headed up and while while we talk about doing a project or working on economic development, we manage that day from A to Z and it's became the largest workforce development initiative in Wayne County. Last year, during Manufacturing Day, we had seven hundred students individually pick where they would like to go out of eighteen industry partners that participated in that day.
10:16.814 Brandon Burton
I was gonna ask you, what does manufacturing day look like?
10:19.468 Justin Starlin
Yeah, exactly. So Manufacturing Day is a is a mass approach of building awareness about what is happening in your community. I think as chamber professionals and executives, we can we take maybe for granted every once in a while when we drive around the community and we know what is behind what's happening behind the walls of a big building. Many of our citizens, many of the students that are Going through high school or looking to graduate, have no idea what's happening in that community. So Manufacturing Day opens the doors again to 18 industrial partners that were part of the day last year. Opens the doors, educates not only the citizens through some of the marketing efforts that we do for the day, but it has 700 students go out and truly walk into the facility and see what's happening, try to get them excited about. what's happening here in Wayne County, and you hope to retain that talent to assist in your workforce development.
11:22.798 Brandon Burton
So are those 700 students, students that have expressed interest in going into the manufacturing industry, or are they the graduating class or where where are you getting that pool of 700 students?
11:36.152 Justin Starlin
It's very interesting, Brandon. We have every single school district here in Wayne County participates. So we've had we have thirteen school districts participate in that. Yeah. So and what's great is we have we have allowed the the districts to make that decision. Some districts say we'd like to take our sophomores to manufacturing day. And the reason being is here in this great state of Ohio. Those sophomores are getting ready to make a decision if they would like to go to the trade school or their technical school. and maybe there's a spark that day in manufacturing day. So some s districts will bring their sophomores, Brandon. Yeah. Others will bring seniors maybe that they know are not going to college, or there's maybe some kids that are looking to get in into engineering, they might be chosen to be part of the day. So because there is job opportunities, you know, post college and even during college, you know, some co ops and stuff like that. so it varies depending on what the district feels as if is their best strategy in engaging their students in
12:46.476 Brandon Burton
All right. Are you able to get any feedback from the schools as far as what these students do after they graduate to know if they go into that career path or if they're going off to school or what they're doing?
12:57.838 Justin Starlin
Absolutely. So we have last year was the first year. And this is we've done this program now for this will be our seventh year this fall. Hard to believe. But last year we were able to secure the names for each of the students. And we are working with a local tech company on tracking those students post graduation. Because you know, it's it's great to have an event where you can, you know, have kids let's say go for a field trip. But we want to be able to go back to our our constituents who are the industry partners and say, hey, listen, out of the seven hundred kids who participated in manufacturing day, we were able to to secure or know that fifteen or twenty percent of them are working within with within Wayne County. And that just that justifies Brandon us putting the effort into the day. So also we've heard from the industry partners that it is that it's a great great thing because they are seeing those students come back and and to apply for jobs directly.
14:04.664 Brandon Burton
So what is it about the Wooster area that draws so much industry, manufacturing and so forth? Is it just because there is a base there or certain incentives that are being offered or what what makes it so attractive?
14:17.58 Justin Starlin
Yeah, so availability of land and water is is a big piece, as for instance when we were working with securing daisy, we were able to offer them large quantities of of what they needed as for from a product perspective is just pure water. So we've got great assets here, great land availability, and w hardworking Midwestern people. so we got a great reputation of people that are hard workers, just like we've seen through the through the nation though. the availability of those those workers are are are declining. And you know, and that's where I think the chamber plays a role in trying to engage the next generation to fill the voids that are indefinitely gonna be happening.
15:01.026 Brandon Burton
All right. So tell us more about your chamber and and what else is you guys are doing to stand out.
15:07.916 Justin Starlin
Yeah, I you know, I think well a a couple other things that are unique is we we decided to to make a decision, kind of our approach to members and non-members, maybe a little bit different. There are chambers through throughout the nation that if you want to receive anything any information from them as to what they're doing maybe in the community or with their membership, the only way to receive that information, Brandon, is to pay the membership. Yeah. And for us, we while membership dues are an important component of our budget and we don't take them for granted, we think that promoting our organization, being active in the community and doing good things, making a difference, we truly believe that the membership will take care of itself. So the information as to what we're doing, we offer free information to non-members as well. one thing that is y unique, we are probably one of the very few chambers left that physically prints a newsletter each month and it's about sixteen pages long and it's in it's in hard hard paper format, print format. And that we print around twenty three thousand copies of that each month and we get it out to our citizens. And we get it out to both members and non members. The reason is is We are A trying to build up our brand and show both members and non members what the chamber is doing. But also we're trying to to promote community development and community participation. And and with community participation from our younger generation, we know that what they'll s what they'll see and what the chamber is doing. They'll see that value add and they'll they'll challenge their business if their business is not a member. Or they'll take the lead and say, Hey, I'm going to go talk to the boss about us supporting the the chamber and being a part of what you're doing because it it it's important to our community. And that may seem cliche, that may seem, you know, puppy dogs and unicorns, but it's very true. Our newsletter has built our brand up that we're recognized for being a leader in community development and the and the membership is followed. The the membership members have followed.
17:32.288 Brandon Burton
And say going back to the data, as long as you've you've got the evidence pointing to the success of that that form of communication, then you you have to keep doing it, right?
17:43.018 Justin Starlin
Exactly. So I think that's pretty unique. And then also, you know, while while not everybody's getting the the physical print of our newsletter, our social media, we've we've leaned on that heavily. and you know, we don't over post some I've seen some chambers post five and six things a day and there's you know there's post fatigue. what we do is we try to be strategic in our our post and use the social media. And we're proud to say that we've built our our likes up our follows on our as an example on Facebook. We have the largest nonprofit following in in Wayne County. We're around thirteen thousand likes and follows. And we we really, really concentrated on that because it now every time that we post something, as an example, last night we had a an event with our area special Olympics organization. When we post something May maybe it's just photos of the game. But it boy, it's hitting a humongous audience, both from a business perspective and from our citizenry, which continues to build our brand and all does come back to strong membership and people wanting to be a part of what we're doing.
18:57.562 Brandon Burton
You know, i it used to be that the email was the way to reach everybody and you guys have kind of taken a step forward with social media and and I was maybe could be could be perceived a step backwards with the the mailers, you know, the the hard copy newsletter, but I think with email it quickly became abused and where the print media just kind of got neglected. You guys are kind of filling that void. But you're also being cautious with your social media to not abuse that like email has been for so long.
19:32.718 Justin Starlin
Yeah, you know, and and what's I think w one other thing to keep in mind, fellow chamber execs is that we we we when we post something, or we're trying to sell a sponsorship, we can say that it will receive how many views on social media you want those to be strong. We will also say that it w it'll get twenty five thousand or twenty three thousand views in our newsletter out to the community. That's a selling point for us. We've built that audience and w it's been a it's been a great us as far as selling sponsorships to events because we're able to show a positive return in just the pure marketing money. Absolutely.
20:08.942 Brandon Burton
Absolutely. I was thinking just in general, between building the brand awareness in the community and being able to have those numbers to support, it can't help but boost your nondues revenue on multiple levels, whether it's sponsorships or awareness of community events or anything that you guys have going on.
20:25.944 Justin Starlin
Yeah, and you know, Brandon, the more active that your chamber is as far as being I believe this, being part of the solution to a problem or bringing a company in or you know, partnering them with the resource that they need. If you can become that point of general point of contact, you know, businesses start to see value in the organization. And it's much easier for us to then call and say, Hey, will you sponsor you know, the Field of Dreams game for two thousand dollars this year. will you be one of the main sponsors? When they were receiving something that they they can equate to value from your organization. Yeah, you're getting that by being active, it's much easier to sell and and and get those sponsorships.
21:13.656 Brandon Burton
Yeah, absolutely. Great points. So what what else do you guys have going on there?
21:19.336 Justin Starlin
Okay, so and you know, a couple things that just to kind of put it put it in perspective, our organization, we are really, really heavy on events. we've got probably for what we do on an annual basis, probably a skeleton crew, I would say, of four. and we what we're blessed with is we have two marquee community events, and that have we've been doing for thirty plus years. our chamber is unique in the fact that we We have a an an Oktoberfest in downtown that we that we head up. And the great thing is is that is you would say, Well that is the it's called Woosterfest in downtown. That's a Wooster chamber event, but it's a community event. and that really has garnered us some, you know, some visibility. the brand for Woosterfest, which we try to build on, is so well recognize in the community that when people find out you mean the Wooster Chamber is Woosterfest? that even gives us bigger kudos in in the community as well. one other thing that is unique that we've been able to do is we recognize longstanding supporters, people that are making a difference in the community and businesses that are growing here in Wayne County. I I think a lot of chambers have an annual dinner. and ours is we think it's pretty special. last year we had our annual dinner and mind you, our community, put it in perspective, Brandon, is twenty eight thousand people. We had nine hundred and sixty people at our annual dinner. So and we we had it Yeah, that's pretty good. So and we were we we challenge ourselves to be
23:10.476 Brandon Burton
That's pretty good.
23:16.59 Justin Starlin
non conventional. So we actually had the dinner in an the iconic former RubberMade manufacturing facility, which if anybody knows the brand RubberMade, that was world headquarters. It was the world headquarters was right here in Wooster. Wow. And that the kind of a real quick story is they went through a transition. They left town and we were able to to secure Gojo Industries, which manufacturers Purel. Okay. So Pure Purel production is happening in the former Rubber Made facility. We were able to kind of welcome them to town and celebrate the rebirth or the reutilization of that iconic facility in town at our annual dinner and nine hundred and sixty people celebrated with us that evening.
24:05.304 Brandon Burton
Everybody got to have clean hands while they ate.
24:07.438 Justin Starlin
Exactly, exactly. We th we think that's pretty unique and pretty special. And so when we can do things like that and we post it on social media, the the the local newspapers picking up, the ri the local radio's picking it up. it's all about brand identity and showing that we're active in the community so that we are that number one point of contact when someone has a question or an inquiry as to what's happening to the community or they want to do something. That's the most from our perspective, that's extremely important.
24:40.93 Brandon Burton
So I can see why so many people would want to attend that annual dinner to be able to check out the facility and and the new new business there. And I I like the idea of being non conventional and how you went about that. Are there other examples of you guys being non conventional, whether it's in in this event or just others in general that maybe other chambers could get some ideas from?
25:06.348 Justin Starlin
Yeah, you know, that it that's a tough question, as far as non conventional, you know, with like for instance, for with the Woosterfest in downtown, we continue to press ourselves to to make sure that it's not stale. I think there are chambers that have events or that they maybe take for granted. And those are an important line item on your budget. So when we first started to look at Woosterfest, it is a a very important component to our budget on an annual basis, Brandon. And so when we started looking at how are we going to engage the next generation to come downtown to an Oktoberfest in a Midwestern town that likes country music. How are we going to do that? So the shift from if we talk about beer sales, the shift from Bud Light and Miller Light to a a a large array of you know I IPAs and craft beers. Yeah. It's very interesting. And initially the idea that we were gonna br add add more got some grumbles from the people that have attended the festival in the in the years. But and we also brought TVs in and we were showing games and we if we were setting up, you know, kind of a yeah. And we even brought a wiener dog race to the show. Okay. All of these things, I guess the point is all of these things initially from our older constituents and members who like tradition, they question where you a wiener dog race? You know, why are we getting away from the the stuff that we've done in the past? The truth is because we don't want to die on the vine. And so that has allowed us to engage the next generation. And what where where you see what's really interesting is Those who initially question you and said, Man, what are you doing? When there's eight hundred people that come downtown to watch the first annual Woosterfest wiener dog race, you it's hard to argue with the participation and the the interest in the event. And so that's an example that we've transformed Woosterfest, which is an annual event. In transforming it, we've have secured its future, we have grown revenue.
27:07.97 Brandon Burton
Yeah.
27:26.882 Justin Starlin
And we have grown participation in the next generation. That is all gonna bode well for the longevity of our our financial position here at the chamber when it comes to that event.
27:39.032 Brandon Burton
So all the chambers listening, they need to find their own version of a wiener dog race.
27:44.91 Justin Starlin
It's it's Samara Zimmerly does all of our she's a staff here that does all of our events and programs. She's she's the right hand woo man. And when she came up with this idea of a wiener dog race, I said, You've got it. I mean no one's gonna come and watch that. Well it it was only eight hundred people. So and we had we had wiener dogs from an hour and a half away, Brandon. So yeah, it was it was phenomenal.
28:09.728 Brandon Burton
See, and you may have just started a whole new industry too of breeding racing wiener dogs.
28:17.198 Justin Starlin
Exactly.
28:19.768 Brandon Burton
Yeah.
28:21.208 Justin Starlin
But but you know, I we we've never lost the focus of it's important that we community involvement, engaging members, people just having a good time and having positive thoughts and feeling good about when they come out to a a chamber event. Don't let things get s get stale. And even if you have a board that's hold that maybe says, well let's just do it the way we we used to do it or maybe a staff that's almost let's say virtually tenured and just don't wanna change things. if you don't change and and grow and you know and kind of mold into the next generation, you're gonna see a decline as a chain row.
28:59.18 Brandon Burton
Yeah, for sure. So that kind of leads to the the next question I was gonna ask you. If you can kind of condense and summarize from the different aspects of things we've we've discussed today in this interview, what is one action item that listeners can do at their chamber to take their chamber up to the next level?
29:22.062 Justin Starlin
Yeah. if anything to one action minor item, and we've done a number over the years, but I think one action I item would be personally l really look at where your brand is in the community and and find out where you are you active. Who are the active players that are making a difference in your community? And truly be without bias, say is our organization a a change agent? Are we in the mix? And find out if we're not in the mix and we're not ones that are at the table when those important decisions are being made, or the you know, they're they're shaping the next step in your community. Why is that? How can we be there? And what imp what steps can we do to to truly implement and and be at the table? I think that bring that'll bring value to you as a as a chamber to say, we need to be here. How do we get there and put a stri a strategy together to make that happen?
30:26.92 Brandon Burton
I couldn't agree more. You gotta be part of the decision making in the in your community and and helping to set up the future for your community. So speaking of future, as we look to the future, how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose?
30:43.682 Justin Starlin
Yeah, so I I I truly do believe that the the the the networking piece and the celebration of openings through events like ribbon cutting, stuff like that, I think that still is an important component. but I truly think that the chambers can play a more active role in community development. Engaging citizens, I think, is really, really important. and through that is is how I think chambers have a great opportunity to to pr just plain and simply promote their business, maybe not to out of towners, but maybe to citizens that are are that wake up every day and say, you know, what's happening in my community? I think the loss of local newspapers, local journalism within your a community, especially smaller communities, how can we as a chamber fill that void? I think that's through active communication to our citizens, showing them what's happening in town. And if there's something that the town is is missing, I think that chambers have the opportunity in the future to say, Hey, community development is important. How can we make our our community unique so that people want to be here? I think that's an important role that chambers can play in the future.
32:04.182 Brandon Burton
Great advice. And you gave some good examples about how you can be unique. I mean nobody can copy you 'cause you gotta be unique, but
32:10.758 Justin Starlin
That's right. Hey. A a little R and D, a little rip off and duplicate. There's nothing wrong with that too.
32:16.206 Brandon Burton
well, Justin, I wanted to thank you for spending some time with us today here on the podcast. I also want to thank everyone who's out there listening. I'm glad you're here. The show notes for this episode can be found at chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode thirty-one. But Justin, where can listeners connect with you if they have any questions about what you discussed today or how you're doing things at the Wooster Area Chamber?
32:43.352 Justin Starlin
Yeah, so the best way to reach us just give the the the website WoosterCamber dot com. all of our contact information from a staff perspective is there. If you want to learn about how to do a successful wiener dog race, you get an email to Samara Zimmerley. if you have questions about community development or economic development, I would be more than glad to answer those questions and be can be found at Wooster Chamber. That's W O O S T E R Chamber.com.
33:09.696 Brandon Burton
All right. That is perfect. We'll get all that in the show notes too, so people can know where to find you. But again, Justin, thank you for being with us and best of luck to you guys with the Chamber of the Year.
33:21.048 Justin Starlin
Thank you, Brenda.
33:25.91 Brandon Burton
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Episode 30 — Longview Chamber 2019 Chamber of the Year Finalist with David Jochum
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: David Jochum
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.192 Brandon Burton
This is a special edition of Chamber Chat Podcast as I begin a series of interviewing the finalist for Chamber of the Year for 2019. I hope you enjoyed this series, but first, the intro. 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.
00:29.688 Brandon Burton
Thank you for joining us today. This is our seventh interview in our special series of the 2019 ACCE Chamber of the Year finalists. This is episode 30 of Chamber Chat Podcast, and I'm your host, Brandon Burton. It is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. If you're new to Chamber Chat Podcast, please visit Chamberchat Podcast.com/slash start. To learn more about what you can expect from the show and you can also receive some valuable tips for some non-dues revenue ideas to use at your chamber. Again, that's ChamberThatpodcast.com slash start. And before we jump into the show today, let's take just a quick moment to learn about the sponsor for this episode. Chambers are not considered for chamber of the year without having great programs and steady streams of non-dues revenue. I want to introduce you to a great affinity program. From Swipe It. In partnership with Chamber Chat Podcast, Swipeit is one of the best credit card processors in the business. With the Swipe It Affinity program, you can save up to 40% on your credit card processing fees at the Chamber and help your member partners to do the same. Chambers who take advantage of the Swipe It Affinity program can add thousands of dollars to their non-dues revenue annually. Please visit Chamberchatpodcast.com slash CC for more information and to request your complimentary cost savings analysis from the experts at Swipe It. The first 20 chambers to respond will qualify for free equipment to get set up. Again, visit chamberchatpodcast.com slash cc to start swiping with swipe it. Alright, we are back and our guest today Is David Jochum from the Longview Chamber of Commerce in Texas? Dave is the Business and Leadership Development Director for the Longview Chamber, and in his role, he oversees all things membership, and he works alongside with the CEO Kelly Hall on implementing their Healthy View initiative. Dave has been with the chamber for three years and is in the midst of working through the WACE Academy. In 2011,
02:55.522 Brandon Burton
Dave became a founding partner and certified coach, trainer, and speaker with the John Maxwell team. He has trained thousands of leaders, both volunteer and paid, in the powerful principles of servant-led leadership that are at the heart and soul of John Maxwell's leadership philosophy. Dave has been married to his wife, Michelle, for 28 years. They have four children, ages 14, 16, 22, and 24. Dave's passion is to add value to people and positively impact the community. Dave, please say hello to the chamber chat podcast audience and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
03:38.358 David Jochum
Sure. Well hi hi Brandon. Thanks for having me. And hello to the audience out there. happy to be with you today. gosh, I guess there's a lot of interesting things about me. But today what's been on my mind is that I was born and raised in the New Orleans area. And so certainly the folks down there in my thoughts and prayers as they deal with this potential storm headed their way and the flooding that might come from that. So it was a great place to to to be from and to grow up. but I tell you what. I love, love living in Longview, Texas.
04:09.614 Brandon Burton
Longview's a great place and I'm sure I'm sure you're keeping an eye on on New Orleans and and everything going on there. In fact I was just talking to my wife this morning. We're planning a trip out to to Florida this summer and we were gonna make a stop in New Orleans on our way out. And now we're keeping an eye on the storm ourselves to see if that's gonna happen or if we need to take a different route. So our our prayers with the the people in that area. So Dave, can you share with us a little bit about the size of the Longview Chamber so everyone listening can relate a little bit better to to the chamber and and things you guys have going on there?
04:50.232 David Jochum
Sure, sure. our our town, first of all, is just over eighty thousand in population inside the city limits. Our county, I believe is about at a hundred and twenty thousand. our trade area is is much larger than that in in our region of East Texas. But our chamber has a thousand members and we have a one point three million dollar budget. our budget, about a about thirty percent of that budget is membership dues and the rest is non dues revenue.
05:21.71 Brandon Burton
Right. That's a a great balance right there. That's the kind of thing we like to see. So in leading up to this chamber of the year, with being a finalist, what is making the Longview Chamber stand out to be considered as a finalist?
05:39.054 David Jochum
Well, I I there are two things that we submitted, which is I think kind of the process. You submit a couple of your projects that that you've done in the last couple of years. One of those is around our redevelopment work in our city. and that both of our projects come out of our strategic initiative, which is called REACH, and it stands for redevelopment, education, advocacy, collaboration, and health. And our redevelopment work is focused a lot on our downtown area. And several years ago after one of our intercity trips, and we've taken probably eight to ten of those trips over the last eight to ten years, the idea of a comprehensive plan came out of one of those trips. I believe it was the one to Chattanooga, Tennessee. And we recently as that plan has been implemented and we're looking at what to do next there, our our city council and the volunteers who've been a part of that. Came up with with about a hundred and it was a hundred and four million dollars or something like that of projects that need to be completed over the next few years. And so there's a big bond election on that. And you know, anytime you're talking about potentially raising people's taxes, they're not necessarily thrilled about it. But yeah. But I I the great thing was that our city rallied around it. The chamber really got behind the push for that bond election. Because we believe very strongly in our comprehensive plan and in the future of our community. And we had one of the best voter turnouts our city's seen in quite a long time, f for a bond election in particular, and it was like a two to one margin in favor of the projects that were on the on the docket for that. So so that's one of the the big things that helped us to stand out. The other was our work around education. which which involves a whole lot of things, but one of the things, one of the main things, is our East Texas Advanced Manufacturing Academy, which also came from one of our intercity trips. The the the vision was cast, the dream was birthed, and people came back to town and said we gotta make this happen. And so some of our industry leaders especially were very interested in helping our high school students that were not gonna go away to college.
08:01.506 David Jochum
To be ready with job skills that they could be employed right out of high school, making a livable wage. And so these industry leaders were telling us, hey, we've got jobs that we're gonna need people for coming right out of high school if we can get them some training and we can start them out at like fifty thousand dollars a year. Now, I don't know what fifty thousand does in New York and Los Angeles, but I can tell you that's pretty good in Longview, Texas. So so that That's what kind of began that that route there and our f our chamber has a foundation and the foundation really has taken the lead in in helping that to come about. Our economic development corporation, which is a separate entity from us, gave a million dollars towards the project. So they they funded a great deal of it. but our our foundation board signed the contracts and rented the space and all that kind of stuff. So so those two things, The bond election and the East Texas Advanced Manufacturing Academy were the things that caused us to stand out.
09:06.796 Brandon Burton
All right. So why don't you tell us a little bit more about the the bond election and you know what was what you guys had going on there as far as redevelopment work. How did you guys get the the branding, the marketing out there to get that kind of turnout for the bond to pass, you know, so yeah, two to one ratio?
09:26.36 David Jochum
Yeah, we obviously we had some community partners. there there's an advertising company in town that that helped us out with the with the logo and and you know the images and things that we we put out there. and there's just some other community influencers were gathered together. you know, convening is one of the big things that a chamber does, right? Convening leaders and influencers. And and we got those folks together and began a social media campaign. we didn't do anything like we didn't do television ads or anything like that, but but newspaper, social media, YouTube. our our CEO has a deal that she calls E to ETE, employer to employee initiative. And that involves like a one page info sheet. maybe it's an infographic sometimes, and she also does a video along with it about four times a year. And so that was an avenue that we used as well. Kelly had a video made and produced the sheet to give out to our larger employers to help them have the conversation with their employees about the importance of this bond election for the future of our community. We talked in terms a lot, Brandon, about the fact that look, we're we're not doing what we're doing here for us. We're doing what we're doing here for our kids and grandkids. w we believe we have a great place to live. We believe we have a great future here. and we want it to be a place that our kids and grandkids can stay and and raise their families and not have to feel like they have to go on to Austin or Dallas or Houston or a bigger city to to live their life. So that was, you know, a lot of the big push behind it.
11:12.46 Brandon Burton
So what with the redevelopment work, what is the what's the exact target that you guys are trying to tackle with this bond and the the money being pulled together?
11:25.484 David Jochum
Yeah, there's there's several things. it involved the the the bond money involves police and fire or you know, public safety issues. So our police department, for instance, their building was built to accommodate, I believe, about maybe eighty employees or s something around there, and we have two hundred and fifty employees now with the police department.
11:48.546 Brandon Burton
I'd say it's time.
11:49.834 David Jochum
It's time and they've been renting space. The building was built in the seventies. It's not it's not a bad building. It's just not it doesn't fit the need anymore. so this includes a state of the art police department building that's gonna be phenomenal when it's done. it involves some some upgrades to a couple of our fire stations. Our fire department has a training area that they it's really kind of a part of or next to one of our parks. And it's really not the best situation because that park is in a neighborhood. So they have needed a place outside of that for their their fire training, their safety training. It's the kind of thing, you know, where they they set a little building on fire and and fight that fire and and do their their drills and such. And so that it it includes that, that they're gonna get a a new space, a new area in which to to have that. besides safety, parks and recreation, some upgrades to a number of our parks in town. one of one of the things that that includes is we have ten miles of trails that go around our city, walking, biking trails. And and they're paved. these are paved trails. And we're trying to finish up connecting those so that there's a continuous ten mile trail all the way around the city. and so so that's neat. It's it's really awesome. and so it's it's some of that was included in this in this bond. and and then you know, some f a few street type things. There's there's a corridor coming into our town from Interstate 20, where there's this intersection that's what we call in Texas wonky. you you get to it and you're not a hundred percent sure about which way you need to go. because of the way it was initially built. So we're gonna improve that. we're gonna take that street that connects to that that intersection and then kind of comes around to our downtown area and we're gonna put that street on a street diet. I I I don't know that that's the term that the city planners like. I think there's another term that I can't remember. But it's it's it's basically taking that street from four lanes down to two. it won't impact the traffic flow.
14:10.328 David Jochum
They're adding bike lanes on there and you know, just beautification to that area so that it's more walk and bike friendly along that path. and it'll lead people from our one of our big universities into our downtown area with with hopefully with ease is what we we expect to happen. So the bond included that as well.
14:33.63 Brandon Burton
All right. A a street diet. I've never heard that before. I mean, maybe like street tacos or something, but yeah that
14:40.31 David Jochum
Right, right, right. Th there's I'm telling there's a better word for it, I just can't think of what it is right now.
14:45.246 Brandon Burton
Yeah. No, I think that works. you said that and I knew exactly what you're talking about. So i if that's not the word, it maybe should be. So how about with the education workforce initiative? Let's maybe dive in a little bit deeper there and and tell us how that program works, how you're getting in front of these juniors and seniors to get them that work experience to help them be employable.
14:53.15 David Jochum
Right.
15:13.6 Brandon Burton
Right out of school at a a good livable wage.
15:16.494 David Jochum
And if you don't mind, I'll back up kind of to the to the genesis of of that education work. Yeah, it in Longview we have in us in our city limits, we have three independent school districts. I'm I'm not, you know, I I've only been in Longview for about five years, so I'm not altogether sure as to why that is and and most newcomers to town don't understand it either, but it it is what it is. Probably so. And and so they they haven't always worked really well together.
15:21.826 Brandon Burton
Yes, that would be great.
15:38.286 Brandon Burton
That a hundred years ago.
15:46.38 David Jochum
You know, there's been some turf and territory type stuff. so we realize that the kids that are in school today, regardless of whether they're high school, middle school, elementary school, they're our future workforce. And as a chamber, it's important to us to make sure that our businesses are going to have what they need as these kids, you know, graduate high school. We also know that. High school success doesn't start in high school. It starts in elementary school. And so we adopted one of our local el elementary schools that was struggling with their test scores and and that kind of thing. And said, Okay, we would like to come in and partner with you and see if we can help you where you need help. We brought a program in called Raising Highly Capable Kids for the Parents. And We're about to enter, I believe, our third year of this with these parents. We we started a couple of years ago. The first group we had twenty-five parents come through. We had an English track and a Spanish speaking track. about half the parents, you know, in in either one of those. And we graduated those twenty-five parents at the end of the school year from that program. They meet once a month on a I'm sorry, they they meet for a semester once a week for about twelve weeks. And we do it in the fall. and and so we graduated 25 parents the first year and about that same number the second year. And like I said, we're about to enter our third year of that with that elementary school. In addition, one of the things we realize is that the principals oftentimes they'll let other groups, nonprofits, come into the school to help. It might be boys and girls club, junior league, partners in prevention, mentoring, things, that kind of stuff. They let him in, but but the principals often don't even aren't fully aware and engaged with what those organizations are doing. and those organizations really aren't necessarily strategic in helping the principal reach his or her goals. So we said, what if we did what we do and we convened those people, we gathered them together, and let's work collaboratively on solutions for this school.
18:07.392 David Jochum
And so we got all the leaders of those nonprofits that were coming into that school. We met with the principal and said, principal, tell us what your goals are for the next school year. What are you really trying to accomplish? What's most important on your list? And then those nonprofit leaders talked about what each of their organizations bring to the table that can help reach those goals. And then they thought about okay, where are the gaps in there? And could we help one another bridge those gaps to help? this principal meet her goals. And so that's what happened. And that's been as phenomenal a thing as working with those parents.
18:46.516 Brandon Burton
An excellent an excellent example of convening and trying to get everybody behind the same purpose and really seeing what all these different nonprofits have to offer. I love that idea of just bringing everybody to the table together and work towards a common goal. I think that that's an excellent example.
19:05.206 David Jochum
And Brandon, doesn't it seem like one of those things that you'd like slap yourself on the forehead and say, Man, we should have we should have thought of this twenty years ago?
19:12.116 Brandon Burton
It does. Yeah. What were we think what were we doing? Yeah.
19:15.072 David Jochum
Right, right. Well, out of all of that, you know, we we've other other schools, other school districts have said, Hey, we we went in on this, you know, we like what you guys are doing here and and in the process we said, Okay, you know, it would be great if we could get our superintendents from each of these districts and even the districts outside of the city limits that are still part of our county, if we could get them all in the same room at the same time. And wouldn't it be really awesome if we could get them to meet with some of our key business leaders? And let them talk about what let the business leaders tell the educators what they're seeing, what they need, where some of the challenges lie for them, and then let the educators tell the business leaders what they might could use from them to help them succeed in their work. And we had first one of those probably three years ago when we started all of this. And from that is some of where that advanced manufacturing academy came from. because the business leaders were saying to those superintendents, hey, you know, we don't we don't just need kids running off to college. We need some college graduates, but we need some kids right out of high school. And and the print the superintendents, each of them have their own kind of vote type center, but none of them had anything that these manufacturers needed for their future workforce. And even their current workforce because there's machinery and equipment that the schools can't, you know, any one district on their own couldn't afford to to put into place. So that was one avenue that the whole idea, the whole dream, the whole vision came from. And you put that together with what we saw. It was actually our trip to Waco, and we saw their manufacturing academy, and those people got together and said, Okay, this is the answer. And we can we can make this happen in our town. Now here's the cool thing. There's a lot of cool things, but here's one of the cool things is I think in Waco, I believe it took them three years from the point of the decision to make it happen to making it happen. We were able to get ours up and running in one year, which is phenomenal. and it was again because of the people. Brendan, I gotta tell you, I I have been so impressed. one of the first things I did before I even worked for the chamber.
21:37.65 David Jochum
is I heard about their leadership program, Leadership Longview, of course, here. And I said, I've I've got to do that. That that's when I met Kelly Hall, our CEO, and ended up doing some volunteer stuff for the chamber. But when I went through Leadership Longview and I saw the cooperation and the collaboration that happens in this town, when I heard from city leader after city leader, county leaders all saying the same things about the direction that they want to take this town in. I thought, man, this is impressive. And you know, on on the surface, you come in, you look around, you drive around, you might not be, you know, particularly impressed with our town. It's nice. We've got some nice views and things. but when you meet those city leaders and those county leaders and and you meet some of the movers and shakers who want things to happen here, it's it's amazing that you know, the collaboration that comes about. When when we all have the same vision, we all have the same dreams and concerns for our town, a lot can happen. And that's that's what we're seeing. The momentum has been building. And we're pretty excited about what's gonna happen from this point forward because we've we've got some big plans and some big dreams. And so that again, that's that's all of that's fed into making that manufacturing academy happen. we we didn't consider really any other part of town but downtown for that academy, because again it it falls into line with our redevelopment work. We found an old a building that had been at one time used by a car dealer who moved to a a more growing part of town. And so we said, hey, can we lease that? And we did, and that's where the academy is now. And so it it it looks really nice. It it spruces up that part of the block and that that street. downtown, it look it looks really awesome. And again, it was just it's just because people came together and and and nobody with a big ego trying to get all the credit. we we put we tell people all the time we're the catalyst, we get the wheels turning, and then we let it go. it's it's not our our name's not on the building. our name's on the lease, but our name's not on the building. And and and and we're not it we're not trying to own it.
24:02.316 David Jochum
We know other people know how to do that stuff. We don't. so so we just want to get the ball rolling and and and be the catalyst for making those things happen.
24:12.546 Brandon Burton
I like how you you were talking about with the developing those skills to be able to go to the employers and and find out what the needs are, what what skill base are they looking for as they hire and make sure that's in alignment with with the these high schools, with these these students looking to graduate and making sure, you know, all along the way that everything is aligned to be able to to meet your goal. And I think that's just so invaluable. And I see this more as a a trend now. I don't know if trend's the right word, but I see it happening with more and more chambers where that attention and that focus to developing the local workforce and keeping people in their town and and not necessarily, you know, shipping everybody off to some university and and going for that big diploma, the big big debt and everything. But being able to look at the students and see what the students' needs are, what their skill set is, what do they enjoy? And again, aligning all these different things to make things work and and being that that convener and and catalyst as you're talking about. I just think this is a a great example of how all of that is being pulled together. So kudos to you guys.
25:26.062 David Jochum
Thanks, yeah. And another part of the the goal there is that even the kids that do go off to college, wherever they wherever they go, we really want this to be a place that they plan to and want to come back to when they're done. you know, that this truly is home for them. So that's a that's a whole nother part of the story, but
25:48.184 Brandon Burton
That's right. That's another part of the alignment to work on, right? So Dave, from everything we've discussed today with w all that you guys have going on there at the Longview Chamber, can you maybe condense down into one action item that listeners can implement at their chamber to maybe level take their their chamber up to the next level?
25:52.319 David Jochum
Yeah.
26:12.844 David Jochum
What I would say to that, Brandon, it's it's not an easy thing, right? So it's it's not something you're gonna do today or tomorrow or next week. It's gonna take some time. But I think a big key to all of this for us was that strategic plan. And so I think, you know, getting with whether it's the staff or the board or the executive board, whoever it is at your chamber that or the real decision makers for that. I I think it's it's thinking through and and setting down and writing what are we about? What what what do we need to be about for our town? What does our town need from us? And what does that look like? How do we how do we verbalize that? And then how do we make it a strategic plan so so that we're intentional in our work? We're not just I I I think a a challenge in chamber work. is you can get so caught up in running from thing to thing to thing, you know, busy with event after event or w whatever it is, that you lose sight of the fact that you're trying to accomplish something bigger than the next luncheon, you know. and and we have luncheons, but we we started thinking of our luncheons in terms of how is this luncheon going to help advance our strategic plan? How is this luncheon help us reach the goals that we have set forth? How is this luncheon contribute to the betterment of our community? Rather than just being, hey, come eat lunch, we'll either entertain you or give you some information and send you on your way to let's make it part of the strategy. so that again, I know that's not an easy thing to walk off with, but I think it's key if if you don't have that, man, I would Th I wouldn't do anything else until I had that set. What is our strategy going to be from here forward?
28:11.872 Brandon Burton
I think that resonates perfectly with aligning the purposes and having that strategic plan to make sure everything that you're doing at the chamber aligns with that strategic plan. Now, how often do you guys look at and reevaluate your strategic plan?
28:29.612 David Jochum
We evaluate it yearly at least. I mean, we're you know, we're constantly talking about it because it's sort of our guiding, you know, our our guiding light for our movement. But it's probably what, three years old now, I think. I think it was adopted in twenty sixteen. And and we've talked about even recently, Kelly and I were talking the other day about, you know, what what is the next five to ten years look like? And how does our strategic plan look? Is it gonna continue to serve us or do we need to rethink it? And for now we think it's gonna serve us well for at least the next five years. because just there's just a lot of work to be done in those areas. And we want our chamber to be a truly impactful chamber. We want our we want our chamber to make a difference in our community.
29:17.868 Brandon Burton
That's great. So Dave, as we look to the future, so I ask everybody this question that I have on the show. How do you view the future of chambers of commerce and their purpose?
29:31.918 David Jochum
That is really great question, Brandon, and it's something that I've thought a lot about. if you look at associations of all different kinds across the country, you will see that there's been a decline in association participation in in some areas. there may be some pockets where they're not in decline. so I think we have to be really careful that we stay relevant. to our communities and and again that goes back to the whole strategic plan and and and you know being intentional about the work because i as as the the younger generations come along and they're looking at what we do sometimes they look and they go, what's the point? you know, I don't need networking. I can network in a hundred other ways. I don't need to pay money to go to an after hours or something. And so
30:24.837 Brandon Burton
I'm on Instagram. What do I need to network?
30:26.646 David Jochum
I exactly, exactly. So so they're looking at this through a whole different lens and I think we have to be mindful of that. I think that larger chambers are really gonna have to start to look out, watch and and help smaller chambers so that they can stay viable. I don't know what that looks like, but I just I think we we need to be mindful that if if we're not if our communities don't see us really being impactful, contributing to the to the betterment of the community. I I think it we're gonna have a hard sell on why we need to stay in business. So I I again the strategy, being intentional, and then again, having each other's backs, you know.
31:16.416 Brandon Burton
I love that point of the the larger chambers kind of looking out for the smaller ones to make sure they stay relevant and and stay in the forefront of of the right minds. That's key. That's huge. Well, Dave, I wanted to to thank you for spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. And of course, thank all the the listeners out there for tuning in and being here with us. The show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode thirty. And Dave, where can listeners connect with you if they have any questions about what we discussed today or how you guys are doing things at the at the Longview Chamber?
31:55.802 David Jochum
our website is longviewchamber.com. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and I think we're even still on Snapchat. I don't mess with Snapchat, so I don't know if I think we're there. and I and you can find me on those those platforms as well.
32:14.304 Brandon Burton
All right. That's perfect. And we'll try to get links to all those in the show notes so people can can reach out and connect to you from from there. But again, thank you and best of luck to the Longview Chamber as a finalist and hope things go well for you.
32:29.688 David Jochum
Thank you. It's been great to be with you, Brandon, and we're looking forward to it. We're excited.
32:37.056 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 29 — Ocala/Marion County Chamber & Economic Partnership 2019 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Kevin Sheilley
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Kevin Sheilley
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.226 Brandon Burton
This is a special edition of Chamber Chat Podcast as I begin a series of interviewing the finalist for Chamber of the Year for 2019. I hope you enjoyed this series, but first, the intro. 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.
00:29.89 Brandon Burton
We are back today for our sixth interview in our special series of the 2019 ACCE Chamber of the Year finalists. This is episode 29 of Chamber Chat Podcast, and I'm Brandon Burton. It is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your Chamber members and your community. If you are new to Chamber Chat Podcast, please visit Chamberchat Podcast.com/slash start. To learn a little bit more about what you can expect from the show and you can receive some valuable tips for some non-dues revenue ideas that you can use at your chamber. Again, that's ChamberThatpodcast.com/slash start. And before we jump into the show today, let's take a quick moment and hear about the sponsor for this episode. Chambers are not considered for chamber of the year without having great programs and steady streams of non-dues revenue. I want to introduce you to a great affinity program. From Swipe It. In partnership with Chamber Chat Podcast, Swipe It is one of the best credit card processors in the business. With the Swipe It Affinity program, you can save up to 40% on your credit card processing fees at the Chamber and help your member partners to do the same. Chambers who take advantage of the Swipe It Affinity program can add thousands of dollars to their non-dues revenue annually. Please visit Chamberchatpodcast.com slash CC for more information and to request your complimentary cost savings analysis from the experts at Swipeit. The first twenty chambers to respond will qualify for free equipment to get set up. Again, visit chamberchatpodcast.com slash C C to start swiping with Swipe It. All right, our guest today is Kevin Sheeley. From the Ocala, Marion County Chamber and Economic Partnership in Florida. Or for purposes of this interview, that we'll call it the CEP. Kevin is the president and CEO of the Ocalab, Marion County Chamber and Economic Partnership, the community's primary chamber and economic development organization. He is a career chamber/slash economic development.
02:48.962 Brandon Burton
professional and has spoken across the country on issues relating to economic and community development. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Excellence and Economic Development Award from the U.S. Department of Commerce. The CEP is the current Florida Chamber of the Year and is a finalist for ACCE's National Chamber of the Year for the second time in three years. 2019 marks Kevin's 25th year in the Chamber and Economic Development Field. Prior to coming to Ocala, Kevin had worked in economic development in Kentucky and Tennessee. The CEP represents the fourth time he's successfully assisted communities in merging or creating new economic development entities. Kevin is originally from Louisville, Kentucky, and is a graduate of Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. He and his wife Lisa. are the parents of three children. Kevin, please say hello to the chamber chat audience and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
03:57.27 Kevin Sheilley
Excellent. Well good morning or good day. It's good to be on with everyone. wow, that was a really long bio. I'm sorry that you had to read all of that, but I appreciate it.
04:07.466 Brandon Burton
It doesn't look so long on paper, so
04:09.862 Kevin Sheilley
Exactly. I something interesting. You know, we talk about within Chamber World standing out, and that gets to be a little bit easier for me in that I am six foot six. So I tend to stand out in a crowd. But the interesting part of that is I am a twin. I am six foot six and my twin is five foot five. So if you ever saw the movie twins,
04:33.407 Brandon Burton
Really?
04:38.624 Brandon Burton
Yeah. Schwarzenegger, right?
04:39.308 Kevin Sheilley
Yeah, yeah, my my twin sister hates that movie in that intro. And she will not be happy if she hears that I made that illustration. But but that's I was quite a bit larger at birth and have always been quite the the big one.
04:57.752 Brandon Burton
Wow. That is interesting. I wouldn't have ever guessed that. Well, can you share with us a little bit about the size of the C E P so we can all relate a little bit better to to where you're at and your chamber and all everything you've got going on.
05:13.176 Kevin Sheilley
Sure. the CEP, we have just over fifteen hundred partners. we don't call them members, we call them partners. I think when I looked earlier today, we're at the 1523, 1524 level. our our total budget is about 2.3 million, and we serve a we are the Chamber and Economic Development Organization for our community, and we serve a community of about 360,000.
05:41.304 Brandon Burton
Wow, that's that's a good sized community. So as I mentioned in the bio, as we as we read through that, this is the second time in three years that CEP is being put up as a finalist for ACC's Chamber of the Year. So what are you doing there that besides being six foot six to to stand out amongst chambers to be considered for this award?
06:07.618 Kevin Sheilley
You know, I I think the advantage that we've had, and and I think it's the reason that we're a finalist again for ACCE and the reason we won Florida Chamber of the Year last year, is we had the great advantage. In in 2011, 2012, our community really went through some some serious soul searching about what what does it mean to be a chamber? What does economic development look like? What does our community need? What's the role of the business community? and that really led to what was the merger of the Chamber of Commerce and the Economic Development Council. And you know, throughout the Southeast, it's not unusual to find that EDCs and Chamber coming together, splitting apart, coming together. Almost every EDC at one point grew out of a chamber. But this was a unique merger. And they in my mind, they really did it the right way. And I was pleased to be a to have been a bit a part of it. In that they said, look, we're not going to take two things, screw them together, but keep them separate. We're really going to blow all this up. If we're going to do this, let's do it right. What what does a chamber, what does economic development need to look like at this point in 2013? What what does that need to be? And so it's really been a chance to kind of reimagine what our organization was going to be and do and how we operate. it's interesting to me, and you know, we all spend a lot of time. I'm hopefully looking at the Horizons twenty twenty five document. And while that was not a a document that the board here, the the the leadership looked at, they weren't even familiar with it at the time, it's really interesting that a lot of those points, those influencers, you can really see implemented in how the CEP has been organized and and how we operate. And so I think it's really about for us, one of our our key purposes is to be a vision, a model of excellence for what a twenty first century chamber should be and do. And I think that's part of the reason it's allowed us to really stand down.
08:10.754 Brandon Burton
That's right. So what are some of the programs that you guys have going on that you're, you know, take some pride in that that you'd like to share with us?
08:20.76 Kevin Sheilley
Sure. Well, there are couple of things. You know, I think one, and it's it's one of the things we've submitted in our application, one of our our synopsis programs, is in relation to a a key cluster industry here for us. people may not be aware unless they're in the horse industry, but Ocala is the horse capital of the world. and I'm originally from Kentucky and my friends in Kentucky don't like when I say it. there is not only some some data behind it, but there's actually a court case. that determined that yes, Ocala is the horse capital of the world. We have more horses than any other county in the United States, actually, more than the next two counties combined. and we have more variety of horses than not only any place in the US, but probably more than any place in the world. There's only four other places that rival it. we have over 60 breeds of horses. So But but so we're the horse capital of the world. One of the things we did here is, but what does that really mean? how how does that contribute to the business community? How does that impact us? We commissioned an economic impact analysis. And just on our community, equine contributes $2.6 billion with the BE dollars a year to our local economy. That yeah, that really caused, I think everyone calls the horse community to stop and go, wait a minute. Really? it caused our elected officials to all stop. And and it costs the business community to stop. And so as we looked at this, look, if it's this important of a cluster, that this important to our community, we need to work and have someone dedicated to engaging this community. So we began an our Equine Engagement Initiative. I have a fantastic lady on my staff, Louisa Barton, who her sole job is to work to engage the equine community so that they are better enable to work together and improving the town and farm com relationship and really creating additional opportunities for business and for growth and it's really been phenomenal in the two years that we've had the program to see the impact in bringing together and engaging the equine and because while they're farms they're also businesses and making sure that they're engaged with the the business community as a whole and so that's a really unique aspect of what we do here.
10:45.536 Kevin Sheilley
To my knowledge, the only only chamber in the country that has an equine engagement initiative.
10:50.698 Brandon Burton
Yeah, that's fascinating. What what is it about Marion County that draws the all the horses, all the the horse people to to Marion County?
10:59.298 Kevin Sheilley
So there's a couple of things. One, just like my home state of Kentucky, here we have a limestone underlay. And so limestone is really important for horses. as the the rain and as the dew seeps down into the ground, the all the minerals in that limestone then get soaked up and come back up through the grass that the horse eats. and that's fantastic for their bones. It really strengthens their legs. and so that's why you find Whenever you find that limestone underlay around the globe, you'll find in particular thoroughbreds, but but horses in general. And then of course our our fantastic climate. that you know, we we don't have harsh winters, we don't have winter much at all. And so you know, what happens on the thoroughbred side is that many times almost all of the the top thoroughbreds are are bred in Kentucky, few are b bred here in Florida, but most are bred in Kentucky. But then when they're 10 days old, they're immediately shipped to Ocala to learn how to be a racehorse. Cause they tend to be born in January, February, March. not necessarily the best time to be outside in Kentucky or in New York or some of the other s thoroughbred states. And so they all come here. so it's not unusual in a typical Kentucky Derby, for example, the twenty horses this year, 17 of them had ties to Ocala.
12:20.16 Brandon Burton
Wow. That is pretty neat. So and I'm always fascinated. Yeah, I'd I'd mentioned to you before we got on that the actual interview here that the part of Texas I'm from is considered horse country is kind of the the the name of of Aubrey. And I never have really fully understood where the money is in the hor I mean it seems like an expensive hobby to me, but where where do you see it in your in your area there in Marion County and Ocala? How does it work? How does the business the the horse business work?
12:53.73 Kevin Sheilley
So there's there's a couple different aspects, but first I have to tell you, you know, there's a great story. Do you know how to make a small fortune in horses? Start with a large fortune. Start but you know, it's I mean we have the farms which are important and whether they're they're thoroughbred, we're you know, Florida in in a particular we're number two in thoroughbreds, we're number one in Clydesdales, we're number one in Pasafinos, we're number one in a whole variety, or number two in Arabian. So all these these breeds.
13:02.784 Brandon Burton
That's right.
13:23.128 Kevin Sheilley
So there's that aspect of the the breeding of the horses, the training. we have tremendous again on the thoroughbred side, a tremendous number of facilities here for training racehorses on the thoroughbred, but also some of the most well known horse trainers who crossbreeds can be found here. Pirelli, for example, who has an international reputation, has moved off his operations to Ocala. But then the other aspect of what makes us unique is we have these significant kind of business aspects. So the thoroughbred breeder sales, which are where five times a year we have thoroughbred auctions. the top two-year-old in training sale is here, and so you have buyers who come literally from around the globe for a week or two buying thoroughbreds, and and and it's fascinating when we look at the numbers. their average daily spend, these are business tourists. the average daily spend for these groups is nearly three thousand dollars a day. And that's nothing equine. That's food, hotel, spending. I mean these are high dollar, the kind of folks you want coming into your community to s to spend money. And and then we have all of the this huge aspect of of equine, which now is really growing. It's all the competitions and whether that is an inventor. whether it is dressage, whether it's something that's huge here, foreign hand, whether it's barrel racers, western style, we have a number of facilities that that attract and bring in competitors who who come in. And so a lot of them will train here. We have two Olympic equine teams who train here, sometimes as many as three or four, but we have a lot of international competitions that come in in in all these different competition areas. So that's become a huge piece. And for us coming up in in in 2021 in January, the largest equine competition facility in the world will be opening here, the World Equestrian Center, which is a $400 million private development equine competition facility. Half a million square feet under roof, air conditioned, 10,000 seat outdoor arena, 17 other arenas, 2,500 permanent bar installs.
15:41.358 Kevin Sheilley
We really see this equine just continuing to grow and expand.
15:46.766 Brandon Burton
Some of these horses get better taken care of than some people. Yeah.
15:50.046 Kevin Sheilley
It's phenomenal. We go through the the the barns are being built at the World Equestrian Center and they're all air conditioned and heated. the horse never has unless they're competing outside will be in air conditioning the whole time. I mean they have special beds basically in the stalls, special feeding systems, special showers and baths, and it talks about all the things coming in. I mean it's it's it it's unbelievable.
16:15.384 Brandon Burton
So I I love how your chamber really grasped onto that, you know, if you notice the big economic driver of the equine equine, you know, community and be being able to kind of latch onto that and help drive that. it's a great example for for any chamber really to see what it is in your community that really is a a driving force economically and get behind it and push it.
16:38.636 Kevin Sheilley
Absolutely. And and you know, for us, I mean it's it's important, it's an important economic driver. It's also helped us to engage a lot of businesses who otherwise didn't even think about being involved with the chamber. And and so that's really been a great partnership across the way in everything that we do.
16:55.67 Brandon Burton
That's right. So what so that's one of the programs in your synopsis. What what is the other program that you guys submitted?
17:03.522 Kevin Sheilley
Yeah. The other program we submitted is what we call Nextworks, which is our talent development initiative. we have a great program where we're engaged in engaging the business community to partner with our school system and with in particular our two higher ed providers, Marion Tanical College and College of Central Florida, to really make sure that we're refocusing on skills based education and creating seamless pipelines and and career ladders from high school. We're getting ready to start going back down to middle school all the way through bachelor's degrees and really creating a series of programs where a student is when they graduate from high school, they actually have skills and they're ready to go to work. In many cases, with our career choice academies that we've worked to set up in each of our seven high schools, those students actually already have an associate's degree or nearly have an associate's degree with the College of Central Florida. But they're also set up in these seamless career ladders so that they can come in and out and get additional training in those areas that go towards their bachelor's degree, so that they're never backtracking, but really continually advancing. And all of our career choice academies and our pipeline programs align with identified needs of our business community based both on our recruiting targets here at the CEP and our high demand occupations from our career source, our employment services agents. So all of our entities are working together to really advance a skills-based education that runs from middle school all the way through college.
18:44.578 Brandon Burton
So what kind of I guess data were you looking at to to come up with this next works initiative? What what were you seeing in the workforce or education to to make you decide to go this route?
18:57.314 Kevin Sheilley
You know, several pieces. I mean part of it here at the CP, we are the the economic development organization. It's fully integrated into everything we do and and both on our business attraction and our business retention efforts, you know, it was consistently seeing, you know, we're not it's not now of course for everywhere it's difficult to hire additional employees, but you know, making sure people had the skills, companies wanting to pay more, but then employees not having the skills they needed. And and one of my personal areas is and there's tremendous amount of data out there. You know, for 40 years we told every student in our country that the key to success was to go get a university degree. Didn't matter what it was in. You just get that piece of paper and you're going to be successful. And, you know, now we're really starting to look at that angle, man, that that really wasn't the right thing. We we sold a lot of students a bill of goods that we're not able to deliver on. And and it's hurt our workforce, it's hurt our employers. And it it's really holding back people because they have debt and a degree in an area where they don't have interest or passion and and they're not really able to move in the direction they want to. And so making sure for us, we really focus on what we call the three E's. And that means that when a student graduates from our schools, they're ready for employment, they're ready for enlistment, or they're ready to enroll in higher education, and that we treat all three of those with the equal amount of attention and and focus. But obviously for us as a business organization, as much as we could bring the business community in and keep them engaged, not just a one-time, hey, here's something we need, schools go provide it, but an ongoing partnership. And I tell you what I think is most fascinating is that we have this incredible ongoing working partnership between school system and higher ed, where everyone is really about what's in the best interest and how do we work together and how do we make this happen. And okay, this isn't This isn't as good for me financially, but it's really in the best interest of our community. So here's what we're going to go do. and so it's got a whole series of initiatives that are involved. one of the neatest programs is we ask students in our career choice academies, and those are areas like logistics, automation, robotics, IT, Power Academy. But what is what do you want? What do you want as students? And interestingly, and this is a perfect fit for us as a chamber.
21:19.18 Kevin Sheilley
Is I said, you know, we really want to network with professionals in these fields that we're studying. So, well, man, we can we can help, we can do that. We created a program called Nextworking. just kind of made it up as we went, but it was tremendously successful. we did 12 sessions last year, each targeted. So we did one on logistics, one on health occupations, and and went down the line. We bring in 40 students from those areas. We'd bring in a dozen business leaders in those targeted areas. And it was phenomenal. We we do a quick session teaching them the students how to network. And then we did some speed networking. You know, we'd put four or five students at a table and two adults. And for five minutes, they would they would talk and and share information and then the buzzer and then they the adults would rotate tables till they everyone had a chance to meet. Out of every single session, we had students who came out with internships. Part-time jobs. We had s at the end, we had students getting lined up for full-time jobs for graduation. businesses who were really excited, who are ready to get more engaged in what we were doing in those areas. So it was it was a win-win all the way around. and and again, just responding to the needs of both our students and our businesses.
22:37.76 Brandon Burton
Yeah, I love that. So as you were explaining how that program works, I was wondering, you know, oftentimes parents try to live their unfulfilled dreams through their children. Has there been any pushback from parents when it's presented that maybe you know enrolling in higher higher education isn't what your kid wants to do, but maybe they want to get employed right out of school or enlist. Do you do you get any kind of pushback from the parents saying that's not what we had envisioned for our child?
23:10.744 Kevin Sheilley
You know, we've actually gotten very little. In in part because we make a distinction between there's a difference between college and university. not every student needs to go to the University of Florida. Probably most of our students need at least some additional credential beyond high school, and that's the College of Central Florida or Marion Technical College. Yeah. helping to to define that, that to say maybe and also be able to say, look, maybe you need to work for a while, maybe you need to be in this area before you figure out exactly that next direction. you know, I not only has it been extremely well received, we the CEP actually led an initiative and helped to secure an an ad a referendum for our school system that fund all of our career technical education. we did that last fall and and we received 73% of the voters approved it. We want every precinct but one in the community to raise an additional twenty million dollars a year for our schools just for career technical education. So I think there's tremendous buy in. I think that the people really are starting to understand the importance of of skills and that there's a difference between university and college.
24:19.402 Brandon Burton
So I think that's a great point. And I like the idea of of these students being able to get some type of work experience to see if they even like the field that they're considering going into before they go take out a ton of debt going to university. Let's let's test it out, see if it's something you're even interested in once you get into it. I've heard too many stories of people going to law school and then they, you know, go and pass the bar, get hired on at some firm and they just absolutely hate it. But they're, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt.
24:48.376 Kevin Sheilley
And and you think about the opportunity cost. I mean, that's seven years of school. so those all those pieces come into play. So, you know, we we want and need, you know, we have huge nursing is a tremendous need here. Engineers, I need engineers. And so those are all important and we encourage those areas as well. But but let's make sure every person has the opportunity to be the best who they can be.
25:11.17 Brandon Burton
Yeah, and I wonder just even maybe on a national level, what kind of sunk costs are involved there when somebody feels like, you know, I had seven years invested, I've got all this debt. I hate being an attorney, but that's what I signed up to do. So I'm doing this. And then it stifles innovation or it stifles, you know, other creativity that could help, you know, in local communities or together in the nation. So I think this is a
25:35.374 Kevin Sheilley
Some some great data I was just looking at talking about that as Americans we're moving less than we ever have. And and I think part of that is because people are are so many times stuck with with debt and some other things that they simply from school they don't feel like they can. and so I think that, you know, I think it has some some pretty significant impacts on our economy.
25:55.862 Brandon Burton
I can't argue with that. Well, Kevin, I wanted to ask, just based on what you've got going there at C E P and some of the things you've discussed today, can you kind of condense down to maybe one action item that listeners can do at their chamber to step up their game and to kind of take their chamber to the next level?
26:18.36 Kevin Sheilley
You know, I I would say and there and I love what we do here. We've got incredible leadership, doing some really neat things. I would say it's o two things. And yeah, I you actually want to give you two. One, it's okay to barbecue some sacred cows. Yeah. it's time to probably those programs, those initiatives that really don't meet your mission, it's time to go ahead and and have a barbecue and just be done with those.
26:35.096 Brandon Burton
Great.
26:46.988 Kevin Sheilley
We so many chambers get stuck doing things that really aren't advancing their mission and lead and certainly staff leadership knows it. It's just getting the volunteer leadership to understand it. and the other thing I'd say is it's okay to get outside the box. I mean, probably one of the most interesting things about our chamber is we don't have any committees. All right. We don't do committees. because what we've learned is in 2019, who wants to serve on a committee? you know, we we ha work a different model, but it's it's okay to change. It's okay to be different and you can grow and be successful. In particular, know your you know your community. So what do you need to to change to go be successful?
27:28.615 Brandon Burton
So you've got me intrigued then. If you don't have committees, what does that different model look like?
27:34.574 Kevin Sheilley
You know, we believe, we talk a lot, and and and we're very clear, it and it's more than just words for us. we don't have any members. we have fifteen hundred and twenty something partners. when you're a business, you're making an investment. you're making investment in the CP, you expect return on investment. If this is if you're looking for something to be a member of, there's lots of civic clubs and country clubs and other things you can be a member of. You're making an investment looking for a return. And you should expect that. And how are you going to earn that return if if we're asking you to go do the work? and so and one of our our favorite sayings that had a chairman who used to say this: a committee is a great way to do half the work and twice the time. So we focus on how do we provide that return. And so we have a professional staff that's out implementing initiatives and programs that drive that return. We'll engage people. in these programs and initiatives, for example, like Nixworks, but it's not a committee. there's not gonna be a set meeting schedule, there's not gonna be you know, assignments made for them to do things. This is really about us providing that return on investment. in turn, for most of what we do at the CEP, there's not a fee. you you you make your partnership investment and we're on a tiered tiered structure. And for the most part, you don't pay anything else to attend, participate, to be a part. You're earning that return. And by attending a CP program event or initiative, you're either meeting new customers or new suppliers or new partners to help you grow your business. You're learning new ways to be more successful to grow your business, or but through your investment, our community is growing, our economy is growing, and as a result, your business is growing. And that's been a, you know, for us, I have to say it's been a very successful model.
29:28.094 Brandon Burton
It all makes sense to me. I like matching up people that it can benefit their own business and see that that return on their investment with the chamber to be able to help out with these different programs. It it makes perfect sense.
29:41.482 Kevin Sheilley
And and for us, I mean, and it's it's one of those key conversations for many chambers, when and using that that language and that approach, we that helps businesses get out of the this isn't coming out of my terrible contributions, this is coming out of my marketing budget. and that allows us to to help move partners up on that partnership tier.
30:01.934 Brandon Burton
Perfect. So Kevin, as we kind of wrap things up here, I've asked this question to everybody have on the show, but we'd like to to ask as we as we look to the future, how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose?
30:16.92 Kevin Sheilley
You know, I I think I'm gonna quote something from the Horizons plan and and that is f I really see chambers becoming and being the same center. you know, with so much polarization on in politics throughout our our communities and our country, and even little issues in communities sometimes becoming polarizing. I think the chamber being able to be that same center, to be able to to lead discussions, to, to move initiatives. and keep our communities moving forward and be able to address things from a very logical business approach, I think really is key. And I think there's no organization who can serve that role better than a chamber. And so I really think that's where we're gonna see more and more chambers and where we're gonna be successful.
31:06.734 Brandon Burton
I think that's good advice. Gives good focus for Chambers to to strive to be that sane center.
31:12.974 Kevin Sheilley
Absolutely. I hope so I think so anyway.
31:15.436 Brandon Burton
Yeah. Well, Kevin, I wanted to thank you for spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. And I'd like to thank everybody for tuning in and listening. The show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchat Podcast dot com slash episode twenty nine. But Kevin, where can listeners connect with you if they have any questions about what was discussed today or how you're doing things at your chamber?
31:38.318 Kevin Sheilley
Absolutely. Of course, we'd encourage everyone to check out our website at OKla CEP dot com or on our Facebook page. And you can find us the same and love. You can find all the contact information there and be happy to to talk to anyone. Or if they are going to be at ACCE next week, love to to catch up there. I'm easy to find. Again, look for the really tall guy.
31:58.44 Brandon Burton
That's right. He stands out. That's great. That's perfect, Kevin. Again, thank you for being with us today and best of luck to you with your with the Chamber of the Year. Excellent.
32:12.622 Brandon Burton
Thank you for listening to this episode today. I hope that you're finding value as you listen to Chamber Chat Podcast. If you are enjoying the show, I would encourage you to tell your colleagues that are in the chamber industry. Also, please hop onto iTunes and leave us a five-star rating and review to help others find this show. Thanks again and I look forward to chatting with you again next week.