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Membership Value & ROI with Joe Venhuizen

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Brandon Burton (00:17)
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. Our guest for this episode is Joe Venhuizen. Joe is the Vice President of Membership and Resource Development for Envision Greater Fond du Lac. Envision is a combined chamber EDO.

Serving the greater Fond du Lac County in Wisconsin, Joe has spent nine years in the industry working in membership sales, program coordination, government affairs, and executive leadership. Joe earned his IOM certificate to the U.S. Chamber in 2025. He is a husband and a father to three boys and an active member of his local church.

Joe, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Joe Venhuizen (01:18)
Sure. Well,

it is a pleasure to be here. So thank you for having me on and look forward to a good discussion. I never shy away from the chance to discuss the industry. It’s one of my favorite things to do and especially with people who actually understand it. You know, I imagine you can be a bit of a bore at Thanksgiving. That’s what I come off. know, people just kind of go, well, you work for the government, don’t you? Or you know, there’s not an understanding of where we are and what we

we do. And so to talk to people who live this, it really energizes me. So yes, my name is Joe. been, I’ve lived in this area of East Central Wisconsin. That’s where I grew up. Aside from education and a couple things that brought me out of the area, I have always been here. So I grew up on a, tell me if you heard this before, I’m a dairy farm kid from Wisconsin. So family farm,

Brandon Burton (02:09)
Are

there many of those? No. Just kidding.

Joe Venhuizen (02:10)
Yeah, it’s fitting the mold here. I’m a Packer fan. I’m wearing the gear here. I’m excited for Sunday to take on the Lions. But

I do bleed green and gold in Wisconsin. I love where I’m from. But I’ve been in this industry nine years. And I have no plans of going anywhere. I see nothing but exciting challenges in my future doing what we do.

You wanted something interesting. something interesting. I’ll tell you this year, earlier this year, I became an official small business owner myself. And that sounds pretty cool. The reality is it’s not that cool. But I did get an LLC. And I formalized under an LLC some things that I’ve been doing for years, which is improv comedy.

Brandon Burton (02:44)
Okay.

Joe Venhuizen (02:59)
So I now have an official business for my improv troupe and we do short form sketch comedy for corporate parties and gatherings and fundraisers and things. So something that I’ve enjoyed doing for many years.

Brandon Burton (03:13)
That’s very cool. So I I love asking that question. I never would have known that about you if I didn’t ask for the interesting fact about yourself. So that’s cool. You’ll have to put up your tour schedule here at the end. yeah. Yeah. That’s right. That’s fantastic.

Joe Venhuizen (03:22)
Here you go.

Yeah, Private bookings only, you know, pay for travel costs. I’m happy to, you know, advertise it on your podcast here.

Brandon Burton (03:37)
I know what you mean about Thanksgiving dinner being the board. When people find out I have a podcast, they’re like, โ“ that’s so cool. What’s it about? it’s chambers of commerce. Like, what? Yeah, so yeah. Well, tell us a little bit about your chamber. Just give us an idea what Envision Greater Fond du Lac has to offer, size, staff, scope of work, budget, just to set the stage for our discussion today.

Joe Venhuizen (03:44)
Yeah.

Yeah,

we’re all in about a $2 million organization. We are a combined Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development organization. That combination happened in 2017. So I joined the industry and the organization before the merger. So I was hired as a Chamber membership and program person. Within my first year, we had the merger that brought together the Chamber and the Economic Development.

We serve a county that’s roughly a hundred thousand population. We are in the county seat and โ“ most of our membership base is in the county seat, which is the city of Fond du Lac. But Fond du Lac County has three cities and various villages and townships. It’s pretty rural. Our big industries here are agriculture and manufacturing. The congressional district in which we sit, the Wisconsin sixth

congressional district is the leading manufacturing district in the country. So we have, we are home to the world headquarters of Mercury Marine, which is the leading producer of marine outboard motors. And there’s a โ“ hefty supply chain with that and neighboring in the region, we have quite a few manufacturing titans in that industry. So that’s a lot of who we service. And then of course, agriculture and

and your standard ground of the mill, all the different industries that Chambers serve. So we have experienced the pains and the joys of merging those two organizations and what it takes to create a new brand and to really have the inner working between servicing existing business needs through Chamber of Commerce services and advocacy and also still working.

under the same strategic plan intent on economic development and business attraction retention and entrepreneurship and workforce development. So it’s been, it’s been very, very good. I always advocate that more organizations look at these opportunities seriously and check egos and really consider what’s best for the business community that you serve. Because a lot of times there is duplicity and there’s

know, competition for resources that it took quite a while for our organizations at that time to make this leap of faith to do this together. But now standing and looking back eight years later, it’s definitely been a success.

Brandon Burton (06:21)
Yeah, that’s great. So how many staff do you guys have between the combined organization? Okay.

Joe Venhuizen (06:26)
We’re at about 14 total. And my role oversees our chamber

operations, and that’s โ“ a team of about four of us. And then there’s operations. We have one CEO, obviously, my boss. And then our economic development and workforce development team forms the other pillar.

Brandon Burton (06:45)
Very good. Yeah, that’s super helpful for us to just understand where you’re coming from as we enter into our discussion today. So we’ll focus the majority of our conversation on the topic of membership value and ROI, which I know it can be a hot topic for pretty much any chamber out there. So I’m excited to dive into that topic and to get your feedback and your experience on this as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right Joe we’re back so as I mentioned before the break today we’re talking about membership value and ROI How do we express that to members potential members? I’ve shared before on the podcast my background is in chamber publishing so Oftentimes I’m interacting with chamber members as a third party and They feel like they can open up to me in that in those scenarios

and they’ll be honest, you know, I don’t feel like I get anything out of my chamber. don’t see, you know, I paid membership dues and I never heard from the chamber again, you those sort of things. So how do you approach expressing membership value and ROI as you interact with your members and potential members?

Joe Venhuizen (09:53)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, if any of your listeners have the right answer on this, you know, in 10 seconds, please chime in. But this is going to constantly be the measure that we use for ourselves is how well are we delivering value or communicating value. One of the things that’s been helpful for me in years of doing this, in annual renewal cycles and understanding the types of members who come and go and then those who stay and why they stay.

is really the way, the type of mindset that a member brings to the organization. The reason for joining is as important to understand at the time that you are interacting with a new member as the way you communicate ongoing. Because if you understand the type of member and the type of value they’re looking for, you can understand

whether they’re going to be long-term or whether this is going to be a, I’m in it for now for me. And then when the me part isn’t working, I’m out. We have done a decent amount of effort recently at Envision in changing some of our language and our materials to reflect more of a fundraising or investor mindset than a member mindset.

And where we are focusing a lot of effort is this getting into a mindset of a long-term relationship, not that there’s a sort of knee-jerk reaction that’s asked for on an annual basis. Did I feel like this year I did enough to get value that I can write one more check, but to really start the relationship off from the bat of this is a movement?

that you’re joining for the long term. And there will be peaks and valleys. There will be times when you need more attention from the business community and the services we offer. And there will be times when you’re off and running the business. But that doesn’t mean that we’re going to be stopping and starting and breaking off relationship. This is both of us working towards success in this region together for the long term.

Brandon Burton (12:11)
Yeah, so years ago I had a friend of mine, he’s a realtor, he reached out to me, he had moved to a new community.

He’s like, Brandon, should I join my local chamber? He’s like, I know you do this podcast about chambers. Should I join my local chamber? And of course, my, my, you know, knee jerk reactions, of course, you know, but I was a little more measured. My, depends, you know, what are you trying to do? What, like, what’s the mission of the chamber there in your community? What kind of committees do they have? How can you get involved? Like, what do you want this to do for your business? It’s not just that.

that magic bullet where you pay an annual membership due and all of a sudden your business is thriving, right? Right. So very much, going back to your, you know, your thought about figuring out the why, why are they joining and what are they trying to get out of it. That’ll help guide those conversations. My thought is going towards how about those members that need to justify their membership to somebody higher.

Joe Venhuizen (12:53)
Yeah, all your problems are solved.

Brandon Burton (13:15)
you know, a regional manager or somebody at corporate or, know, something like that. How do you have those kinds of conversations and help them to, to recognize what the chamber does for them so they can continue that conversation with those that they answer to? Right.

Joe Venhuizen (13:17)
Yeah.

Yeah, that’s a tough one because my answer is almost always, well, who do I need to be in the room with? Because

let’s get to the naysayer, the person who is sort of just evaluating this on paper and not really in the context of a conversation or a true understanding. So those can be really difficult, getting through those local

folks on the ground who say, I got to run it up the chain of command and go, well, let me help you. Let me be part of that conversation. It’s often a good thing. But I think that there’s always mindset shift. And in those critical kind of crucial conversations of, are we valuable enough to use

expense on, right, to invest in. I think that that’s the opportunity to communicate differently. It’s not the time to rattle off the benefits menu, you know, that, well, we do this, we do this, we have all this. It’s really, when you’re in those conversations, it’s really opportunity to pause and to say, what are your goals? You know, what is it that you want to accomplish? And

really get the playbook because people will teach you how to sell them. And when you’re able to get them to communicate, well, here’s what I’m looking for. So your realtor friend, you know, looking for connections in a new area, I just want to meet new people, right? Well, that’s easy. You know, here’s the things, you know, but what your realtor friend may not care about is

all of the work we do with the local school districts in bridging the gap between local industry and future workforce. And, you know, that might be a huge part of what we do. It doesn’t matter to me. Right. So don’t spend any time talking about that because I’m lost. I don’t care. You can fundraise that from other sources. Here’s my problem that I’m looking to solve through your organization. So you need to get the keys to how to sell and you get that from the member who’s considering that value.

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Brandon Burton (15:16)
Right.

Yeah, I guess I’m thinking of those members that they’ve they’ve joined maybe they’ve been a member for a year or two.

Joe Venhuizen (15:38)
.

Brandon Burton (15:41)
And because so many businesses now are operating off of data, which we preach to chambers too, Collect data, make data-informed decisions. they collect the data. They’re looking at their books. And they’re like, OK, justify this to me. How does this make sense? And like you said, who do I need to talk to to help relay the value? I think that’s key. โ“

Joe Venhuizen (15:54)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

We’ve got to tell stories

really too, Brandon. We have to be able to communicate our wins and then how they apply. you know, I think we get very head down in the chamber industry on, you know, we have this annual schedule of events and monthly schedule of events and, you know, this long list of to-dos and there’s a lot of whirlwind there. But when we get significant wins for the community,

those you just can’t move on from those to the next event. You have to be constantly reminding, sometimes ad nauseam, like, here’s what we accomplished. And I’ve talked, you know, it’s eight years post-merger for our organization, but I don’t want anybody in our community to forget how significant that was. And for people who are maybe newer in the business community here, they might not know any better or any different.

But I like to remind them of what life was like before the merger and how significant just being here and being an efficient organization is. And that goes down to resources. Your resources invested in this organization are maximized much more than what they were previously because of this big win. You could have been getting much less value because you’d been writing two checks to two organizations that were both trying to do the same thing. Now we’re doing it all here.

So it’s one example, but eight years later, I can still communicate that to certain businesses who are legacy businesses who’ve been here a while that, know, yeah, you’re right, you’re right. This could be a lot. You the other thing is any time you have advocacy wins, any time that you’ve helped with a business expansion, relocation, an entrepreneur startup, any time the Chamber’s been involved, even, you know, advocating for an infrastructure change that’s small.

I it was Pat McGoy, who’s a long time, know, titan in the chamber industry, tells kind of an anecdote about if the chamber advocates for a stop sign, use that one project, right? Just one stop sign and then try to put numbers to it. So for the business that’s right there, what does this mean for you? So if that one, you know, stop sign,

leads to, and I can’t remember how in this example, but if it leads to more impressions or more traffic that is stopped at your business with visibility, by the numbers, is that 1 % more? that 10 % more? And then what does that mean for your bottom line? So for your million dollar industry, what’s 1 % of that? And then how do you quantify the results of advocacy wins?

I haven’t done a lot of that, but that was something that made me think a lot. Anytime that you have a, you know, a business park expansion or a win on your main street. For example, we advocated for highway expansion that tied our community to the county to the east. And by expanding that road from two lanes to four lanes, naturally it’s much safer. It’s much more efficient for.

Um, you know, for daily drivers, also for the, you know, businesses and freight over the road. Um, there’s a way that you can communicate that to businesses of, different industries that this is valuable and it wouldn’t have happened without our advocacy. So, you know, trying to get them out of this mindset of like, okay, the only thing that matters is customers that walk through my door and go, no, no, no,

It’s not the only thing that matters because that’s influenced by a lot of different factors. And here’s the way that we’re pulling levers on those factors.

Brandon Burton (19:32)
Yeah, I love that. And just the whole idea of the value of being able to tell the story, whether it’s talking about the merger or the recent advocacy wins.

Joe Venhuizen (19:35)
Thank

Brandon Burton (19:42)
I mean, I think every chamber out there is going to have at least a healthy handful of examples of just individual members who have been members, you know, the whole time that their business has been around and, you know, why they stick with it, why they, you know, wins that they’ve seen as the chambers been able to be influential in their business to, again, help increase that bottom line. So being able to kind of create a storybook of sorts that you can go back to and pull from and

Joe Venhuizen (19:57)
Mm-hmm.

Brandon Burton (20:11)
Depending on what the scenario is who the person is you’re talking to to pull from these stories these experiences and say well this is how it worked for ABC business and You know, it’s similar to yours So I actually I had an experience just yesterday with a business owner who was new to this community and She had been a business owner in a previous community for a long time

like 30 years, she had a retail shop and she just moved to this new community, opened a new business. And she said, you know, in my last community, I was a chamber member. And after so many years, I stopped because, know, whatever the reason is, as you come across somebody like that, obviously they had an experience, they gave it a try. It was a different chamber, different community, different state even.

How can you help build the trust for them to give your chamber a chance to be able to help their business? Is there a way of trying to save that or to help them recognize the value? I’m sure the storytelling comes back into that, but how would you approach a situation like that?

Joe Venhuizen (21:05)
Thank you.

Well,

you have to remind people that every chamber is a unique and different organization. And when you have folks that bring past experiences.

It’s just hard to compare apples and oranges sometimes. But what I try to โ“ remember is, and there are examples of this in my years in the industry, that a really good practice to get into is to invite your critics. Invite your critics to dinner. Some of the best volunteers or board members

that we’ve recruited have been those who have been trying to drop, right? They’re trying to leave. saying, you’re not valuable. I don’t get anything out of this relationship. And instead of writing them off and saying, you just don’t get it. You’re not worth it. You weren’t investing that much anyway. If you really take the time to swallow the pride, the ego, you go, know what? You’re probably right. Let’s talk about that. Why don’t you come in?

I had a volunteer, right, sorry, I had a โ“ member of our young professionals organization who after one year hadn’t gotten outreach. We really did fail her. She hadn’t gotten outreach or hadn’t attended an event, didn’t feel like, you know, she belonged. At the time of renewal, she could have just not said anything, but she took the time to write me an email, a scathing email, right, a scathing critique on her way out the door.

Brandon Burton (22:40)
That says something. Yeah.

Joe Venhuizen (22:43)
You guys failed. This was horrible. And again, I could have pitched it in the trash and said, okay, or I could have done the halfway, which is, yeah, I guess we really did kind of screw up. Shoot, that’s too bad. But I went one step further and said, sounds like you’d be a great member of our membership outreach committee. You’ve identified a real need in this organization and we need leaders and it sounds like you could do it. And today,

Brandon Burton (23:04)
I love it.

Joe Venhuizen (23:10)
She’s the chairperson of the whole organization for the young professionals. And she’ll tell that story. It was on her way out the door, but somebody actually confronted her and said, yeah, you’re right. And we could use you to get better.

Brandon Burton (23:25)
I love that.

Great example. And tie in in that storytelling right there. That’s perfect. I encountered a similar situation with a guy that owns a bar and like a brewery. And he was very much against.

the chamber and you know the chamber tried for years trying to get this guy to join. He came from corporate world and he’s like don’t see where we need this and through the persistence they got him to you know come to I think it was a mixer or something to begin with just as a non-member just come you know try it out and now he’s the board chair at this chamber. He’s all in and so it’s I love hearing stories like that love it.

Joe Venhuizen (23:40)
Mm-hmm.

Brandon Burton (24:09)
Anything else come to mind as far as expressing the value and really that ROI to businesses as they either go through their experience with the chamber or contemplate joining or renewing membership with the chamber?

Joe Venhuizen (24:25)
Yeah, I think

it’s more philosophical for me. It’s real big picture stuff of you get yourself in no win scenarios when you really try to justify it on the terms that they present. Because a renewing member may, like we said earlier, may justify value only as, I’ll give you one example. We had a Main Street business who said, I’m dropping my membership because

I didn’t see enough chamber gift certificates that came in the door spending money at my bakery. Exactly. And it was, I would need to see at least, you know, a thousand dollars in chamber gift certificates for this to be worth it. Now, those are the terms that he’s defined for this discussion. That’s the value that he’s defined. You have to get out of that language, those terms and present it on a different battlefield.

Brandon Burton (24:58)
That one metric. Yeah.

Joe Venhuizen (25:17)
which isn’t always easy, but that’s really how you have to get the mindset shift to go, well, that’s one metric. You know what? We maybe weren’t honest with you, sir. We probably should have told you that you’re organization is going to help you. But here’s what we are doing. Are you aware of this? Did you know how, you know, did you know how this this proposal at City Council that almost passed would have impacted your your tax bill or your assessment? And the chamber fought that you probably didn’t even know. Good thing is you didn’t have to know because we’re on your side. We’re advocating on your behalf for things that you’re not even paying attention to. Right. So getting them out of this this way of evaluating value and then getting over here. And a lot of it is, yeah, it’s those advocacy wins. It’s the big initiatives that we’re doing and then not being ashamed to continue storytelling on those wins. And, you know, I said I’m a dairy farm kid. You got to milk them. You got to milk it for everything it’s got, right? Once you get an accomplishment, don’t let it sit on the shelf. Keep bringing it back and leverage it for โ“ membership renewals as often as you can.

Brandon Burton (26:29)
I love that. Great analogy. Malcolm. Well, for the chambers that are listening,

Joe Venhuizen (26:30)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (26:34)
Most of them are going to be interested in taking their chamber the next level, growing, expanding. What kind of tip or action item might you share with that chamber who’s trying to take it to the next level to try to accomplish that goal?

Joe Venhuizen (26:48)
It’s a good question. I think that if you’re listening and your chamber is not involved in advocacy and government affairs, you need to figure out how you can carve out a slice of that game because you owe it to your business community. Our organization pre-merger between chamber and economic development, our chamber was very active in

Brandon Burton (26:58)
you

Joe Venhuizen (27:12)
in advocacy and government affairs. During the merger, there was a fear that because our economic development organization had some public investments coupled with private, that we would be in a bad situation if we were trying to do local advocacy while also relying on public funds. And I won’t say that that isn’t a real factor.

But the result was we shelved advocacy. We got out of the game completely. And it only took a couple of years before we lost influence and we had a big missed opportunity for local development because we didn’t have an established enough advocacy voice to be able to influence this issue. And so it woke us up and it got us back to the table.

We reestablished a legislative agenda, reformed an advocacy committee, and have thrown a bunch of time and energy into it. And we’re yielding the results. Because again, we’ve said it, when it comes to ROI, that’s the trump card. For a business that can never show up to an event, can never be bothered to read an email, there is always, when you have a good, strong advocacy arm, there is always the argument that we did this, you benefited.

You didn’t have to show up just by existing in this community. You’re a beneficiary of this advocacy work that we did. And we think it’s worth at least a small amount of your annual continued investment. So I think that, you know, for chambers that are scared of it, there’s a way to do this in a very easy, non-controversial way, just to become the location where conversations happen.

You can do legislative forums where you’re just inviting in officials with the business community. You’re not taking stances. You’re not advocating positions. It’s an easy way to just get started. But I think that if you’re not doing anything in this advocacy sphere, you’ve got to get at the table.

Brandon Burton (29:04)
Yeah, I love that tip and it plays in very well to our discussion today too.

I talk about it being that Trump card that you can always go back to and you know, if you can get into the micro things for each individual business, but when you’re missing on those accord or you’re not, you know, really hitting it home for that business, you always can lean back on that advocacy card. I love that. I like asking everyone to have on the show as we look to the future of chambers of commerce. How do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Joe Venhuizen (29:27)
I feel like.

That’s another good question.

I think that Chambers of Commerce will continue to remember who they are and

The core of why chambers were started was to be a functional tool on behalf of a business community to accomplish more together than what businesses can on their own. I think as, you know, time goes on and chambers take different avenues and some function more in a tourist or some are in, you know, other areas, it sometimes becomes a

Well, let’s think about this organization like a business and how do we maximize our profits and keep our, people. I think that sometimes gets into a myopia and you’re really just looking down and you’re not thinking and remembering, okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. We’re a tool for the success of all of our businesses. The fear I have is the same thing that the internet did to Chambers when it became prevalent, which was now you have a platform outside of your local chamber where you can do a lot of the connections and the exposure and you don’t need to stop into the chamber office for a map anymore, right? These sorts of things that made chambers valuable. I fear that AI will do the same thing to a lot of the services or benefits that we now provide. And that can crush a chamber that’s not forward thinking or it can just challenge all of us. And so what I mean by waking up and remembering what we’re here for is the value that we provide in an increasingly automated AI culture is, and also in this fragmented political culture is we’re the sane people at the center of issues. And we are the people that know how to have conversations and to bring variety of opinions to the table and come out with results. We’re positioned for that. We’re here to represent businesses, but we’re also in touch with the public sector, nonprofit education, all different industries. We know how to get people to a table in the middle. And that’s something that you can’t automate. So remember how we’re uniquely positioned. And I think that that’s going to be the future of Chambers. just going to be continuing to be the trusted resource in the middle when you’ve got a lot of artificial things that can’t be trusted along the fringes.

Brandon Burton (32:04)
Yeah, totally agree and to be able to understand that core because technology is going to change everything around us. But if we’ve got that core and why we exist and then employ different tools around that core.

Joe Venhuizen (32:14)
Mm-hmm.

Brandon Burton (32:19)
I think that’ll keep chambers relevant in the center of trying to bring some sanity to both sides in long time in the future. Well, Joe, before we let you go, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you and learn more how you guys are doing things there at Envision. โ“ Where would you point them? What would be the best way to connect?

Joe Venhuizen (32:26)
Definitely.

Yeah.

Yeah, we have an easy name, Envision with an E, Envision Greater Fond du Lac. So you’ll find us, if you Google us, we’re online, EnvisionGreaterFDL.com. I’m a phone call guy. So if you want to get a hold of me, just ring me up. My phone number is listed on the website, but it’s 920-921-9500. I’m the only Joe in the building, so you’ll get to me quick. But I would love the chance to talk with you on the phone. I welcome anybody to call me and discuss ideas or book your next improv comedy show.

Brandon Burton (33:11)
That’s right, get that plug in there.

Joe Venhuizen (33:13)
Thanks.

Brandon Burton (33:16)
We’ll get that in our show notes to make it nice and easy for people to find you. But Joe, I appreciate you spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat podcast and sharing your perspective, your experiences when it comes to membership and expressing that value. I know it’s something that we constantly need to be thinking of and building that story bank that we can go back to whenever we need to to be relatable to those businesses that we interact with. So thank you for sharing your insights with us today.

Joe Venhuizen (33:18)
Thank you.

You bet. Thank you for the work you do. This is so important to people challenged in the industry and thinking ahead and thinking futuristically and also just for giving us some of the ideas for how to storytell. What you do is the same thing that we should be doing on the topic what we’ve been discussing. We’ve got to get better at getting the word out and not just in an annual renewal letter.

Brandon Burton (34:08)
Yeah, big fan of Chambers podcasting. I’ll just put that out there. So, all right. That’s right. Thank you, Joe. I appreciate it.

Joe Venhuizen (34:13)
We’ve got a whole lot of time. Thank you.


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Lean into Your Unique Background with Michaela Horn & Brianne Bonnet

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

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

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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Today we we have two guests with us. We have Michaela and Brandon from the Belle Fourche Chamber of Commerce in South Dakota. Michaela is the Director of the Belle Fourche Chamber of Commerce, bringing a diverse background to her role with a degree in Organismal Biology from Montana State University, Michaela has worked in various roles and is also the competitive cheer coach at Belle Fourche High School. She has been with the Chamber for one year and is an active member of our community. Brianne Bonnet serves as the Assistant Director of the Belle Fourche Chamber of Commerce, a role that she’s held for two years. She holds a degree in social work from Creighton University, and has a strong commitment to community involvement. Brandon has worked at the local newspaper Head Start and volunteered the Nash the Newell school board, demonstrating her dedication to supporting and connecting the bell food community. But Michaela and Brianne, welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. We’re excited to have you both with us today. I’d like to give you both the chance to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening and to share something interesting about each other, so or about yourselves, just so we can get to know you both a little better.

Michaela Horn 2:31
Yeah. Well, thank you for having us. My name is Michaela Horn. I’ve been in Belle Fourche for about seven years, and something interesting is I have floated 560 miles of the Yellowstone River. So that’s my interesting

Brandon Burton 2:45
fact. Wow, that’s cool. The great views too, I’m sure.

Michaela Horn 2:49
Oh, fantastic. Yeah, I spent 28 days straight on the river. And yeah, that’s my,

Speaker 1 2:55
my dream. That’s awesome.

Brandon Burton 2:58
Brianne, what about you? What? What do you find interesting about yourself? Um,

Brianne Bonnet 3:03
not near as cool as Michaela has done in her life, but I just really focus around volunteering. I’ve been here in Belle Fourche for 10 years. Um, just different volunteer opportunities that I take part of and just really strive for being involved with the community, being involved. And she

Michaela Horn 3:26
is cool. I mean, she’s a former rodeo queen, and, yeah, she forgets that she’s getting involved in the roundup

Brandon Burton 3:33
rodeo this year. Maybe I should have had you interview say something interesting about each other that would have been better off so well, tell us a little bit about the bell food chamber. Just to set the stage for our discussion, I like to get a good feel for size of the chamber, staff, budget, scope of work you guys are involved with, just to kind of prepare us for our discussion today. Okay,

Michaela Horn 3:56
well, the Belle Fourche Chamber, we’ve been around since 1911 so it’s our 100 and 14th birthday. This year we’re celebrating. We have changed quite a bit, just constantly adapting to what our businesses need. Belle Fourche is population about 5800, and Butte County. We serve Butte County, and it’s 10,000 roughly, our budget is about 100,000 with 245 members and growing

Brandon Burton 4:26
alright that definitely helps us prepare for our conversation today. Are you guys involved at all with tourism or your economic development, or anything like that in your area? Or is it strictly chamber

Michaela Horn 4:38
um so we do have an economic development office that is separate from us. We have Visit Belle Fourche, which is also separate from us, and then a visitor center. So we are mostly promoting the businesses, but we do kind of help each other out and do some small form of tourism.

Brandon Burton 4:55
Yeah, very good. I would say a chamber has to be involved in all those different assets. Aspects, no matter what your formal responsibilities are, right? So for our topic today, we decided to lean into the topic or the idea of leaning into your unique background. And I find this topic interesting because I hear so many diverse ways you know, how people find chamber work, how they get here. You know, very rarely do you see somebody that went to school to become a chamber director. You know, it just, it’s not, it’s it’s not something you see at a typical career day, either. So it’ll be a, it’ll be interesting to dive into this topic with both of you and learn about your unique backgrounds and how others can lean into theirs as well. As soon as we get back from this quick break,

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Brandon Burton 12:40
All right, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’re going to cover the two program synopsis that were included in your chamber of the year application. Lindsay, it’s my understanding you had a significant, pretty significant role in the application and pulling everything together. So I’d like to hand the microphone over to you and have you highlight, I know there’s two different programs, one about an airport, one about move to Jackson. Do you want to highlight move to Jackson for us first, and what that program, what the origins were, kind of the background and and how things have evolved to what it is today.

Brandon Burton 8:32
All right, we are back, as I mentioned before the break today, we’re talking about leaning into your unique background. So with this topic, I don’t know which one of you would like to dive into this first about your uniqueness, your own background and and how that fits into chamber work, and how you see those applications being brought to life.

Michaela Horn 8:57
Well, I guess I’ll start you know, it’s nice, and that’s why I wanted to do this interview together, because we we go into the community together so much because between the two of us, we say that we can have a conversation or relate to everybody in town. We’ve worked with people of all ages. I worked with preschool aged children in Head Start. We actually had met working at a senior living facility. I mean, high school aged kids. She has a background in ranch life, and so when we are working with our local livestock businesses, I mean, she can pick up a conversation about that. I have a science background. Can pick up conversation about that. So, I mean, we really are good at marketing ourselves as the package deal to make sure everybody is included and everybody is involved in the conversation. Yeah?

Brandon Burton 9:50
Brandon, you have any anything to add to that with your your own thoughts, with your uniqueness and background and or if you’ve got things about Michaela that you want to spill the beans on? Yeah? No,

Brianne Bonnet 10:01
um, kind of it is the same we we really do. You never know who’s going to walk in the door, whether it’s a business member, um, just a community lay person. They come in all the time and chat with us too. You know to know what’s going on, and it’s just she’s involved in different groups. Um, she’s a competitive cheer coach, but she’s also, like a little bit more in tune with the arts as well, just being involved in the high school and that kind of stuff. So the community people I always bring up, an example is one comes in and he chats, and he talks about history with her. She’s a history kind of buff, too. Me, not so much. But he loves to come in and chat with her, and then she got him actually talked into volunteering, and the guy was just adamant about not, not. He’s like, No, I can’t talk publicly, and all these kinds of things. And he just and he is, and now he’s volunteering in a couple different things. So it’s just nice to have those different backgrounds. And then, like she said, I have a ranching background, a little bit more agriculture kind of type thing. She’s not into horses. I’m into horses. And so just those other people who call on the phone and they’re like, Hi, we’re traveling through where can I board my horses? And I’m like, Oh, yay. Question for me. I can answer that. So you just get, usually, between the two of us, you get your question answered. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 11:24
that’s great. So I know, before we hit record, we talked about how in the community, when there’s a question that comes up, people say, go talk to the girls. I believe is the title that has been given to you too. But some other you know, say other names, sweet and spicy. I guess the talk about that, some with, with your unique personalities, how you support each other, how it comes to supporting the community. I guess, first of all, being being called the girls like, how did that come about and and that happens, I imagine, from building a reputation throughout the community. But how did you go about building that and lean into that to own it?

Michaela Horn 12:12
Well, honestly, I think Jenny started it. She’s so our neighbor is weather hats, and it’s his wife, Jenny, who owns, uh, deals and steals and spear fish, and she would come over, she’s like, Oh, I’m gonna go check on the girls. Well, then it just kind of stuck and took off. And, you know, it, it’s a small community, and so it kind of spread like wildfire, and that’s people just started calling in. They were referencing to us. It also didn’t help that we had T shirts made that said the girls on the back. So

Brianne Bonnet 12:42
when we’re when we’re at events, or when the chamber hosts events too, we try to wear magic. It’s only us two in the office. I don’t know if that was ever mentioned, so it’s, it’s only us too. So whenever we have events and people have questions, we’re like, Ooh, you need to find us. We try to wear matching shirts to color coordinate colors.

Michaela Horn 13:02
Yes, like people can find us when we’re at an event, you know, whether it’s something sparkly or something a little out of the ordinary. So we’re easy to spot and find and get questions answered. Yeah,

Brianne Bonnet 13:14
we’ve been going out in the community and doing videos a lot too. And of course, you can’t go anywhere by yourself, so we just have to go together, yeah? Because I have to help hold the phone to record her usually. That’s why we’re just the package deal. And it became the girls too. So yeah, and

Brandon Burton 13:31
then you got to be careful about who you might hire in the future, right, to be able to keep that, that brand, going,

Speaker 2 13:37
yeah,

Michaela Horn 13:40
no. I mean, we’re, I mean, we’re open to change too, but, and we always say, you know, we’re one and a half people, so we are, I’m full time, and she is part time. So we try to accomplish and be as many places as we possibly can being one and a half,

Brandon Burton 13:52
yeah, and that’s, that’s a unique challenge of chambers is being overworked and understaffed and getting creative and figuring out how to do it. So I believe one of the other titles you had mentioned, sweet and spicy, is that right? Did I get that right? So who plays which role? What does that look like?

Michaela Horn 14:11
So I’m nice. No, she’s nice too. It’s just, you know, it depends on what kind of answer you’re gonna get. Sometimes you’re gonna get people.

Brandon Burton 14:22
Going to get people like, spicy, you know, yeah,

Michaela Horn 14:25
direct. There are some people in town that are just very direct. And, you know, they like to poke fun with her, and they have that banter going on. And, you know, it’s nice to send her all, you know, they kind of want the spicy one go have a cup of coffee, see what’s up with their business. And you know, if, if someone is very colorful and needs to calm down, well, then you, you send in the sweet one, and I go and butter them up. And, you know, get them talking about, hey, what’s going on next week? And you know, how can we help promote this? And kind of, we like to level people out. So it just depends. Depends on what what they need. So

Brandon Burton 15:02
I feel like some people get into chamber work. They feel like it needs to be buttoned up and professional, because you’re talking business, you’re you’re dealing with businesses and whether or not they succeed, or looking at the hard challenges that they’re facing. And maybe some people are a little hesitant to lean into their personality or their background, depending on whatever it was, what, what gives you that the comfort to be able to own, you know, your personality, because there’s, I feel like there’s a lot of benefit in leaning into that personality, to leaning into what makes you authentically you as you present yourself to business, you know, to the business community. I guess what? I guess the question is, what gives you the confidence to do that and and to not fear, I don’t know backlash or judgment that may come from it.

Michaela Horn 15:56
Well, for me, coming into this role, you know, I think we both work jobs where we were just, you know, expect to be very professional. You know, we worn the more Blazers had to dress a certain way. So we’ve had roles like that. It is nice to have this role where we can kind of express ourselves freely a little bit more, but also that’s just how I feel. Belle food is, you know, like we are a very ag community, and so it doesn’t look very traditional. How do I say this? Because if you go 15 minutes one direction, or a half hour, next direction, when you go to their mixers, they are where, you know, blazers and it is very bright lights and professional. I feel like it turns off or scares some of the businesses that we work with, and so we really do try to be relatable, and everybody is welcome, because we’ve been there Right. Like, you don’t have to get off of work and put on a blazer in order to come to our mixers. You don’t have to. You can come with, you know, cattle dirt and get off, you know, from the ranch, and come hang out with us. Check in with your business neighbors, make those connections, and everybody is welcome. Bell food has been great for letting us just kind of redirect and be relatable. We haven’t really got any backlash. So, I mean, we still do it in a professional manner. We’re just not as buttoned up as a lot of places, because I feel like that’s what our community was eager for and they had a positive response to it,

Brianne Bonnet 17:26
right? No, it’s just, it’s the community culture too. And they just, they, they have seen us enough around town through just our like social media and all that kind of stuff too, that we’re just real people. We we make mistakes too, and so I think that kind of

Michaela Horn 17:49
lets us in or decreases their fear of us, or anything of that matter too. We’re in it with them, yeah, you know. And a lot of people, especially with our social media, they’re afraid to get on Facebook to promote their business. Well, it has to be perfect, okay. Well, now we’re on Facebook, and we do silly stuff all the time, and it doesn’t have to be perfect, and it’s getting a response. We’re modeling that it is okay to be relatable and to be real. But also, we’ve had some members join since we’ve started. And just say, you know, I never, I always felt out of place. I never felt welcome because of the type of business that I’m in. And I’m like, Okay, well, I’ve, you know, we’ve worked in bars. We’ve worked, you know, the Sturgis rally, we’ve been, you know, growers. I’ve, I’ve had janitor gigs like it, whatever the job is. We’ve been there. We’re in it with you. And a lot of the businesses see that we are showing up with them. I mean, it’s not unheard of. I mean, Valentine’s Day, one of our flower shops in town, you know, she called us. She was struggling. We showed up with ribbon, and we started tying ribbon on flowers for her to get them out the door. We’ve had businesses. Hey, we really need help with this. We’re overloaded, so we’ve shut down the office for two hours and went and volunteered. And we’re really there for them, to help them and promote them.

Brandon Burton 19:02
Yeah, I love that response. It reminds me this last week, Simon Texas and I was at the Texas chamber conference earlier this week, and it just so happens that the city it was held in this year was it’s called Denton so Denton, Texas, and as with the welcoming, you know, message was was being presented to welcome all the attendees there. The point was made that, you know, here in Denton, you’re welcome, just however you are like so even those in attendance, some are there wearing suits and blazers. Some are wearing jeans and T shirts. Some are wearing shorts. I mean, it really just you get the whole spectrum, not only in what you wear, but just how you present yourself, too, because that community thrives on welcoming everybody, no matter where you are professionally. What your business type is, how you show up, looking at work, you know your appearance, it really is open for everyone. So I love the comment that you made, Michaela, about especially with the social media aspect, when your members feel like it needs to be perfect before you put something out there, I would argue the perfect stuff, nobody cares about whatever’s perfect that goes out on social media. Nobody wants to look at that. It you’re not getting surprised by anything. You’re not It’s not exciting any of the dopamine receptors right when everything is exactly as you expect. So being able to set that example and and help your members recognize that too and lean into that, I think, is a huge strength that you guys have in helping to model that. Are there other examples that come to mind how leaning into your personalities has helped to benefit you at the Chamber,

Brianne Bonnet 20:56
just our personalities and just our overall backgrounds, like she had mentioned, we work different jobs, but I think a real focus is that we’ve worked at all age spectrums. We worked from tiny kids to very old adults. So we’re just very community aware, and so then when people need things or have questions, that’s, that’s what gives us the knowledge, and we don’t use that knowledge in a like, we know it all kind of way, or anything of that, of like, yes, we understand. We see that we’ve been there, we know, and this is what we’ve learned to help, or that you can use, or other places other we really like to connect members other, from members to members. So like, when this a nonprofit business, was doing their annual banquet, and they’re like, Do you know where we can get baskets, you know, wicker baskets for auction items. And we’re like, yes, we have some. And then also, you know, the Senior Center, the thrift store, they just had a huge donation go over there and other places, and just connecting everybody to each other. And,

Michaela Horn 22:23
yeah, where are the resources? And, you know, they said, You made a fun point, because when we were working with kids, we used to say to families all the time, oh, you know, it takes a village to raise a family. Well, it takes a village to make the town run. There are, you know, the common saying, there’s 20% of people doing 80% of the work. And I’ll be darned if that’s not true, but connecting them with those people, like, hey, we have everything in town, and we can make this happen. You need black linens, okay, well, Belle silver lining has black linens. You need this? Well, grossenberg has this. Or, you know, we’re, we’re connecting our members and putting it all together to make really cool stuff happen in Bell food. And one of the cool things is, I just traveled through Wisconsin, and I was looking up one of the visitor guides, I think I was near Appleton, and I was going through their visitor guide, and I was like, ah, they have music on Main Street. I was like, Bill fuchsia is doing that. Oh, they have this festival. I was like, Belle food is doing that. And I looked up the population, and I think it was close to 70,000 and I was like, you know, we’re a small town, but there are some amazing things, and people who are doing really good work in Bell food, and so makes it easy for us to just shine a light on it and connect it. Be like, this guy’s already doing really cool stuff. You need to go over here. Or, you know, she’s started this organization, this nonprofit, and here’s the work she’s doing, you know, if you want to volunteer, or here’s how she can help your business. And so people are already doing the work. We’re just helping connect the dots.

Brandon Burton 23:42
Yeah. So I think we need to make a t shirt summarizing a quote you just said, that it takes a village to run a village. That’s

Brandon Burton 23:57
I’m summarizing that as a village to run a village. And you guys are the connectors that make that make all the pieces work. So I love that. I mean that should be a chamber slogan everywhere takes a village to run a village. So I love it. But I always like asking for listeners who are interested in taking their chamber to the next level. What kind of tip or action item might you suggest for those chambers listening as they try to accomplish that goal?

Michaela Horn 24:30
Well, let me see, I wrote down a response because we really thought about it. You know, I just think taking time to build relationships like I said, we’re spending time going out into the trenches with our businesses, being there for sport, um, I know a lot of people are like, you, we don’t have time, right? Everybody has the same amount of time, and it’s how you spend it, but we don’t have time. We don’t have time to go do this. We don’t have time to shut down our office. We don’t, okay, well, we’re, we’re choosing. Prioritize and shut down our office to be there for support when we’re needed, and in return, we’ve gotten more members from it because they notice what we’re doing. And one of my favorite quotes was actually told to me when I was 14 years old by Scott Lang, and he said, the more you give, the more you get, the more you get, the more you have to give. And that really, I mean, I think we use that all the time, so we are giving out into the community, and in return, the community is responding, and they want to be on board. And so our membership is growing, and we’re very appreciative, but that just means that we have to buckle up and do more. So

Brandon Burton 25:35
yeah, I like that. I love that response as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, granted chambers all different sizes, and they’re all over. But how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Michaela Horn 25:56
It’s very different. Every chamber is different. Um, do you have to be adaptable and flexible. And I’ve listened to, I’ve been listening to your podcast so and, you know, there’s been some really good responses. The gentleman you had from Traverse City, Michigan, was really good, and his response, and, you know, I think you just need to be adaptable. We do a really cool thing out here. We just started with all the northern Hills chambers, all the directors get together for lunch. And so geographically, we’re not we’re not very spread out. We’re still the northern hills. There’s six of us, whether it’s spear fish, Lee Deadwood, Sturgis, spear fish is, I don’t know, 15 miles, 20 miles, away from us. And we are totally different. What we’re focused on is different. How we serve our communities is different, and you have to be adaptable to what your community needs. You know, some spend a lot of time in legislation and lobbying, and others are very heavily involved with Economic Development and Tourism, and it’s you have to serve your community based on what your community needs. So I think, just be adaptable. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 27:02
I love that idea, though, getting together and doing the lunches with the other regional say, like a regional coalition of chambers. And even though the communities look different, there’s strength and support you’re able to get from each other. There’s ideas you’re able to get from each other. And even though your communities may look and feel different, there’s still a lot of similarities, if for nothing else, that geography of where you are like that’s that would be one commonality that would, you know, kind of overlap all the chambers in a certain region. So when issues of advocacy come up, or, you know, things that need to be talked about. You know, legislatively, you can get a consensus of your membership and take it to that regional coalition and be able to have more power in numbers. So I love that you guys are doing that. And great.

Michaela Horn 28:01
I mean, I’m very thankful that they are willing to do that, because it’s helped with cross promoting each other. I mean, we’re close enough, but far enough away that it’s very easy to cross promote, but it’s nice to have that support system. I mean, even our last meeting that we had this month of another chamber was starting a foundation. Okay, well, can we look at the bylaws of your guys’ foundations? Like, what did you have to do to get this off the ground, and just having somebody who’s been through it, you know, to help you, and that’s nice to have locally, yeah,

Brandon Burton 28:29
absolutely. And the topic of foundations is kind of a buzz right now amongst chambers. And I think there’s a lot of chambers out there that are like, Well, yeah, how do you get started, right? Like the idea? Yes, that’s great. How, where do you even start? Right? That’s not really a Google search that you’re going to find a lot of results for and and even AI might get too deep in the weeds, yeah, to learn from others is really the key. So, great example. Well, before I let you go, I wanted to give you both an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect and learn more about your approach and how you guys are doing things. Where would you point listeners and what would be the best way for them to connect with you?

Michaela Horn 29:17
Okay, well, you can follow us on BelleFourcheChamber.org, and Fourche is F, o, u, R, C, H, E. And I think the easiest, most entertaining way to follow us is through our Facebook page or YouTube channel, which is just the Belle Fourche Chamber. We are, we are uploading all day, every day. There’s a lot going on in Belle Fourche. So we try to keep up, but they can also give us a call. I mean, our number is 605-892-2676, and if they have any questions, or I don’t know, want to come up with ideas, we are consistently the gears are turning. I mean, brainstorm, brainstorm. We have so many ideas that we have written down that we just don’t have enough time to get to. And we love. Collaborating with people, but also love just, oh, have you thought about this, this and this and this, and then connecting them with the resources so they can go out and do it

Brandon Burton 30:07
right? I love that we’ll, we’ll link in our show notes to your website and Facebook and YouTube and everything, so people can can look and follow and reach out and connect. But I appreciate you both spending time with us today here on chamber chat podcast, sharing your your personalities, your experience, and leaning in to your unique backgrounds, I appreciate

Michaela Horn 30:31
it. Thank you.

Brandon Burton 30:33
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2025 Chamber of the Year Finalist-Greater Memphis Chamber with Ted Townsend

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

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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Our guest for this episode is Ted Townsend. Ted is the President and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber, a position he’s held since 2022 he has a wealth of experience and leadership roles across private, public and non profit sectors. Prior to his current role, Ted served as the Chamber’s Chief Economic Development Officer, leading the chamber to its best year for economic development in 2021 he also served as the first ever Chief Economic Development and Government Relations Officer at the University of Memphis and as Deputy Commissioner and COO for the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. Ted co founded and served as COO of our Genesis pharmaceuticals before his transition to the chamber. But Ted, I wanted to welcome you to Chamber Chat Podcast and give you a big congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a Chamber of the Year Finalist. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening, and if you would share something interesting about yourself so we can know you better.

Ted Townsend 2:17
Yeah, happy to and thank you for the invitation to be on the podcast. The Chamber community is one that’s close knit and very strong, and while there is an underlying competitive nature to the economic development aspect of chamber work, we are a community, and we all partner together and root each other on so I’m grateful to have an opportunity to provide some of what is going on in the greater Memphis area. I think for me, number one, I’m a recovering member of the the secret order of the cheering Elvi. And being in Memphis, you know, we’re home to Elvis Presley, and so I was a member of that group, and we would go to, like, the St Jude Children’s Research Hospital marathon and cheer on the runners. And yes, we were in our white polyester jumpsuits and our Elvis classes. I eventually had to retire from that because, you know, polyester is pretty hot and and so that’s something interesting, but I think it speaks to the spirit of Memphis and how we always cheer each other on. And the same spirit is brought to the chamber community, where I often have a chance to meet with peers and other members that are in chamber organizations. And we always love the collegial spirit that that is there. So, so that is something interesting. In terms of my background, I thought very carefully about that my team was telling me, you know, you may not want to talk about the cheering Elvi, but I think it’s fine.

Brandon Burton 3:53
Yeah, that’s great. I love getting those little tidbits. And yeah, and I will say that that’s, you know, a big reason why this podcast even exists is sharing that information and to really kind of be that incubator for that R and D research that’s happening, that ripping off and duplicating research. So, yeah, well, tell us a little bit about the Greater Memphis chamber to kind of give us a perspective of the size, the scope of work you guys are involved with. Obviously, there’s economic development staff budget, just to kind of set the stage for our discussion.

Ted Townsend 4:27
Yeah. So our chamber is a Regional Chamber, given the geography of Memphis, we are right in the southwest corner of the state of Tennessee, but I look across the Mississippi River, literally from this office, and I can see Arkansas, and we’re just north of the state line with Mississippi, so we serve our metropolitan statistical area, which is nine counties and three states. So we have to work regionally and and we help champion all of our chamber partners. Within that footprint our organization, we’re actually one of the oldest chambers in the United States of America, still operating. We’re 187 years old now, formed in 1838 and we were actually one of the charter members that formed the US Chamber of Commerce. So a lot of people don’t realize how old our organization is, and a constant that it has been in driving the business agenda forward for Memphis and now the region, we have a team of 55 professional Chamber members who are dedicated and spirited and driving our economy and workforce and community development. It really spans the breadth of, you know, the Chamber disciplines, both traditional and those that are innovative, from entrepreneurship and government advocacy, you name it, we do it. You know, we focus on really supporting the businesses that are here and creating those conditions that are necessary for growth. But we don’t lose sight on the fact that we serve the broader citizenry of this region. Yes, the businesses, but those businesses only exist when they employ the great people of our area. So we want to make sure that we have everyone equipped with the skills that are necessary to participate and a very great, growing and vibrant economy. Now, we have a budget of about 14 and a half million per year. We are 100% privately funded from the business community. We have multiple levels of membership, and our highest level is what we call the chairman circle, which was formed about 12 years ago now and and that now encompasses 225 of the top business businesses and business leaders in our community. So we’re proud of the fact that we’re 100% funded by the the private sector, because that gives us freedom to operate and and fidelity to make sure that we are ensuring that the business agenda is is a priority. So we interface, obviously, at the local, state, federal levels, with all of our partners and and, you know, we we entrust the responsibility of being a go to to this team, and they take that role very seriously. We have a lot of fun in the work that we do, but we also understand that that the importance of this organization, given how long it’s been around, is a driving force to really challenging any status quo and making sure that we are always oriented to a a forward leaning, uh, posture of progress and prosperity. Yeah, that

Brandon Burton 7:56
having that freedom, you know, being funded by by members. And, you know, private capital is very freeing, like you said, especially when it comes to advocacy and to not absolutely think too carefully responses or approaches. So that’s right, that’s great. Well, that definitely helps to set the stage for our discussion today, and great on these chamber of the year finalist episodes. I like to spend the majority of our time really diving into the details of the two programs that were submitted on your chamber of the year application. So as soon as we get back from a quick break, we’ll dive into those details and learn about those

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Brandon Burton 12:40
All right, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’re going to cover the two program synopsis that were included in your chamber of the year application. Lindsay, it’s my understanding you had a significant, pretty significant role in the application and pulling everything together. So I’d like to hand the microphone over to you and have you highlight, I know there’s two different programs, one about an airport, one about move to Jackson. Do you want to highlight move to Jackson for us first, and what that program, what the origins were, kind of the background and and how things have evolved to what it is today.

Brandon Burton 11:23
all right, Ted, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’ll dive into the two programs that were submitted on your application. I don’t know if you have a preference on which program you want to address first, if it makes any difference on the order, but I’ll let you choose which one you’d like to highlight first? Yeah, so I think

Ted Townsend 11:43
we’ll go in order of what we put in the application. And it happens also be alphabetic too, so it’s kind of nice, but America’s river crossing was the first program that we submitted for consideration to earn chamber of the year. And why we focused on that, because it really did speak to several elements of Horizon, 2035 and our strategic plan of prosper Memphis. 2030 it represented the Chamber’s efforts, really, over the last two decades, to focus on Memphis as America’s distribution center. Obviously, we are seen as a global logistics leader, home to FedEx Corporation headquarters and the largest hub in their network globally. But we also have a high concentration of all of the modalities of transportation. We call them the four Rs, with our Mississippi River, of course, our rail, we have the third highest concentration of rail in the country, and with all five class one railroads with major operations here the third R is the roadways. We have the third busiest trucking corridor in the United States of America, with interstates, 5540 69 and the future 22 really connecting coast to coast and north to south, with Memphis, pretty much in the epicenter of that. And then the last R is our runway. Obviously, I mentioned FedEx and the global hub that they have there, but the connectivity of that really brings in proximity the global market to Memphis within either, you know, 7072 hours or 96% of the world’s market can get into Memphis in just a few days time. So we’re really proud of that legacy, and our infrastructure is a critical component of that. A few years ago, when the interstate 40 bridge had a crack in it, it really shut down all commerce, both in the both along the the roadway itself, but also river barge traffic had to cease for a while, and it was down about six weeks, so the redundancy of our river crossings became of Paramount priority. However, the Chamber has a transportation committee, and we have for 20 years been advocating for additional crossings of the Mississippi River and the replacement of bridges. So we supported the state of Tennessee’s effort to pass legislation called the transportation Modernization Act, which then yielded a an allocation of state funds, $3 billion and out of all of the the needs of infrastructure across the state of Tennessee, and we’ve got 95 counties that all have amazing infrastructure needs, but the state prioritized the the Americas river crossing, as we coined it, and we were honored to to play that role as a chamber and helping the state pass this legislation and. And the enabling funding that we go into major projects along those same lines, the federal government had a bridge replacement program as part of the the infrastructure package of legislation that was passed, which was bipartisan and and with that program we applied with in partnership with the state of Tennessee and the state of Arkansas for the replacement of our interstate 55 bridge. So we did national advocacy in Washington, DC, in partnership with the state. They requested us to do that the first application, we did not play a role in in writing any of the narrative, and it did not score very well. So the state turned back to us and our long history of advocating for this, and asked us to help bolster the the application. So we built narrative. We had our Greater Memphis economic research group that’s embedded inside the Greater Memphis chamber provide some additional data and analysis, and we resubmitted that application, and we were thrilled to be awarded the largest infrastructure grant in the state of Tennessee’s history, $400 million from the Department of Transportation via the Federal Highway Administration, and that is matched with 250 million from the state of Tennessee and 250 million from the state of Arkansas. So it’s a nearly billion dollar bridge replacement, which will really be a signature bridge across the Mississippi River and redefine our skyline downtown in Memphis, so it represents every element of public policy and convening and driving and prioritizing and yet also providing the data and The support and and really humanizing the narrative of why this is important and why Memphis should be granted this, this major award, and for it to be the largest in the state’s history, is not lost on us. This is a 70 year old bridge, not seismically retrofitted. It is a challenge to get across that thing. Now, given the fact that we are the third busiest trucking corridor, so this allows for greater safety, it allows for greater capacity, and it solidifies our position as America’s distribution center, moving forward into the decades ahead of us, I

Brandon Burton 17:34
can see the huge need for it. With you guys being central hub and all the yes incomings and outgoings. It makes total sense. So you said this is a this is part of the stretch of I 55 is that correct?

Ted Townsend 17:47
Yes, it is interstate 55 which connects Chicago with New Orleans, pretty much Memphis being equidistant to each Yeah.

Brandon Burton 17:54
So as I’m thinking about the bridge, when do you know when the original bridge was built. And I guess I’m asking the question, because I’m sure there’s technology advancements. You mentioned, the seismic retrofitting and stuff like that. But what, absolutely, you know technology? Yes, are there?

Ted Townsend 18:12
Yeah, well, it was over 70 years ago, so the lanes are much more narrow than what we typically would see in a new interstate or bridge build present day. So this new bridge will have added capacity, added lanes, and present a much safer environment for for for motorists and and trucks that are crossing. But also, you know, it adds to that, that volume and capacity, as well, the state just completed an interchange on the Tennessee side of the bridge. So coupled with that, it’s, it’s going to allow for much more traffic and logistics to flow through here. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 18:57
that’s, that’s amazing. I know, you know, Dunkin Donuts, as they’re saying, of America runs on Dunkin but you guys probably say America runs through Memphis, right?

Ted Townsend 19:08
We actually can say that. Yeah, we have the highest concentration of logistics companies in the country here in Memphis because of those modalities of transportation. And yes, it doesn’t hurt that FedEx, who employs 500,000 people around the globe, is headquartered here. They have over 30,000 employees here in Memphis, and they’ve been operating for the last five decades here as their base of operations and their headquarters. So yeah, we feel that is true, and that really became very evident during the pandemic when we saw the global supply chain challenges that were well documented. Memphis was actually a solution point for the movement and the continuance of movement of goods around the. Country and FedEx certainly played a pivotal role in the distribution of the vaccines. So we, you know, we like to imagine, you know, Memphis is placing, and, you know, being responsible for the world’s recovery from, you know, an unprecedented global pandemic.

Brandon Burton 20:17
Yeah, well, as far as it comes to chambers making a big impact in their communities and their region. This is, you know, one, obviously putting you on the national stage. So, yes, great, great work with that one. And great. What’s the timeline for when the bridge, when they start working on it, or complete? Yeah, we

Ted Townsend 20:35
we anticipate the beginning of construction in 2026 and the completion of the bridge in 2030 again, that’s a fluid timeline, you know, given materials and construction, but they’re going to be building it right beside the current bridge. And when that is completely finished, they will bring down the the original and and we’re off and running. But you know, it’s, it’s a cable suspension bridge. It’s going to be absolutely beautiful. There are renderings that I’ve seen, and assuming there are no changes in that, it’s going to be a stunning piece to our skyline. So we’re excited for that, and the fact that we get to see it in our lifetime, four years from now is really not that far for a major, billion dollar bridge to be built across a mighty Mississippi River. Yeah, it’s

Brandon Burton 21:28
great to get the background story too. So as any of us listening, you know, drive across the bridge, you know, in 2030 onward, we’ll answer the story of how that bridge came to be exactly the role your chamber had in that well, let’s, let’s shift gears to the second program that was submitted on your application. If you’d like to introduce that one to us.

Ted Townsend 21:49
Yeah, happy to do so, the digital delta. And you know, I love to talk about this program, because it is one of those things where a chamber can put together all of those strategic plans and hope for the outcomes, and you hope that you’re around to see those outcomes. But in our case, the digital delta is a component of prosper Memphis 2030 and we’re already seeing the manifest yield of these strategies that we’ve been working on for the last five years. So the digital Delta, I will say this much if I were to say Silicon Valley, pretty much in any audience. You know, geographically, where I’m talking about and what I’m talking about, and so coming out of the the 2008 recession, going into even 2018 2019 Memphis really took 10 years to recover from that and and we were looking at ways to catalyze exponential economic growth. So we were actually one of three cities selected by the Brookings Institution to go through their inclusive economic indicators lab, along with Indianapolis and Orlando. That took about 18 months, but what we came out of that was with basically a database and dashboard of economic indicators that measure the strength or the lack thereof, of the Memphis economy. We took that and we compared ourselves with nine other peer cities that were similar in population and and business diversity. And so you have a cohort of 10. And as you can imagine, Memphis didn’t fare very well. We were pretty much in the bottom quartile of those cities that we were measuring ourselves against. And there was one economic indicator where we were actually number one, and that was the percentage of Information Technology positions held by African Americans. Hey, mind you, Memphis has the largest African American population in the United States of America. That had been Detroit. We have overtaken Detroit and remain with the highest population. And that is a source of pride. We see diversity as as our superpower, and seeing that indicator was not necessarily a surprise to us as measured against our peer cities, but at the same time that we were coming into this analysis and measurement, the McKinsey report came out along with a Wall Street Journal article that told basically tech companies that if you want to diversify your workforces, you need to move to where that talent is, and predominantly that talent is located in the southeast section of the United States. But the job growth was really coastal, so we. Took that, that methodology, if you will, or that clarion call of action, and started marketing the fact that we have this high concentration of black tech talent to tech companies. I went to Microsoft and toured their headquarters and and they said, you know, Ted, this is amazing. We wish we had known this two years ago, before we committed to building in Atlanta, and I was able to show them that actually, you know, Atlanta is number two to Memphis. So that was a false victory. But nonetheless, we realized we had a lot of great momentum and justification for major tech operations to invest in our region. I met with Mr. Fred Smith, founder of FedEx, who just sadly, recently passed away, and I showed him these data. And you know, he he held up the page that showed the chart with Memphis leading in black tech talent over 53 other major markets in the US, I mean, every big city. And he said, You know, there’s not much that surprises me at this point in my career. He said that this is shocking, and I know that FedEx has played a role in this, because the world is still catching up to the fact that FedEx is a technology company that happens to move packages around the planet, and that was a moment that galvanized our approach. And in fact, he and his son, Richard Smith, who is is a an executive with FedEx, coined the phrase digital delta, so we trademarked it, and we began using that as a marketing platform with the basis of data to say you could move a location here, Google, Microsoft, you name it. Fast forward to last year, and we had the opportunity of marketing Memphis to x ai, the startup AI, company of Elon Musk, and we were able to win that project and and beat out 50 other markets that they had been considering because of the fact that we could move at the the speed they wanted. We had the power that they needed, and we had the people and and so that now represents the largest investment in the state of Tennessee’s history. So you can see, we love to live in the superlatives, largest Infrastructure Grant, largest private sector investment in the state’s history. And now Memphis suddenly is thrust into the lexicon of great global tech hubs, because we are home to the world’s largest and most powerful supercomputer, which is x ai that powers grok their interface. So so now we have shifted our focus to the supply chain of AI Artificial Intelligence, both upstream and downstream. What does it take to create AI, it creates tangible things. I mean, you have to have servers, you have to have graphics processing units or chips. You have to have cooling systems and and all of these, these things that that energy that go into the creation of artificial intelligence. So and given the fact that Memphis is such a great logistics hub, it makes sense to now have Memphis focus on becoming a high tech manufacturing hub where you have proximity of these AI products that go into the end users. So we not only announced x ai last year, they’ve they’ve doubled down. They invested $12 billion dollars, and their first phase, they have committed to expanding their footprint from 200,000 GPUs or Nvidia chips, to now a million Nvidia chips. So the supercomputer is just getting more powerful right here in Memphis. So when you think about the computational power that it will take to put humans on the surface of Mars that will be originated from Memphis, Tennessee, and it still gives me goosebumps, and it’s that validation of what is the digital Delta. When you launch something like that, you you know, obviously get a lot of questions, and it’s new, and it’s a moniker that many people weren’t familiar with. They would ask questions, well, does that mean electric vehicles or robotics or AI? And the answer is yes, all of it, tech is ubiquitous now with business. And yes, we’re home to Ford Motor Company’s largest electric vehicle assembly plant and and so yes, we have the, you know, FedEx is largest hub, which has a tremendous amount of automation and robotics. And yes, we’re home to the world’s largest supercomputer. So now you have this concentration of investment that that reflects what the digital delta is. And we’ve even got the governor. Of the state of Mississippi using digital Delta in a Politico

Ted Townsend 30:05
interview that he just had. And, and, and they, they’ve had major announcements that reflect how they are growing in the AI space and in Arkansas right across the river. And I point this way because I’m looking literally out my window at Arkansas across the river, they announced Google is coming in to West Memphis, Arkansas, and that’s a $10 billion investment in a large data center campus. So suddenly, there’s validation of the PROSPER Memphis 2030, vision that was embodied in the digital Delta marketing effort. And we’re going to continue to add to the constellation of these great tech companies like Nvidia and Dell and super micro, who have all committed to coming to Memphis and having significant operations. And that x ai investment garnered us deal of the year last year from business facilities magazine, and we were the only chamber to be recognized. Mostly it was state led organizations and the great projects that they were able to announce in the platinum, gold, silver level, we won the bronze, but it was a Greater Memphis chamber that was recognized. And coming from my background at the state, when we won the state of the year and economic development. A lot of the deals of the year that that culminated with that, I wanted to bring that to my hometown, and I’m incredibly proud of this team and the effort that they put forward to not only get America’s river crossing funded and and soon to be built, but then the digital Delta really taking taking hold and and becoming our our identity. It’s a transformational moment, and it’s not something that we hope will take hold decades from now. It’s it’s already been realized, and that’s incredibly rewarding. Brandon, yeah, that is

Brandon Burton 31:59
great. What a a great accomplishment with the win of x ai, but also the continued inflows. That’s right, you know, the thought hit me that there’s, there’s enough people out there that think AI is going to take all of our jobs. But curious with x ai about how many jobs are being created in the Memphis area with this

Ted Townsend 32:21
facility, that’s a great question, because that was what we got as well. Well, this is just another data center. No, actually, it’s not data centers store data, but this is a computational learning cluster. So they have about 300 full time employees right now. 82% of those are Memphians, and they pay at Palo Alto rates, so everyone in that facility is making six figures now, and they don’t require four year degrees necessarily. So we have seen that as a tremendous opportunity where we can specialize accelerated skills training, provide people with certifications and credentials that can go to work in the world’s largest supercomputer and earn these incredible wages that are family sustaining, and that’s what that’s what chambers do. That’s the essence of of why we were created, and the work that we do. And and it’s so incredibly rewarding to be able to see that Memphians are feeling the impact of this. And, yes, this is a an attractor for in migration of talent here. And given the fact that they’re going to be exponentially growing the supercomputer, you know, we anticipate even more jobs. I mean, this is, you know, they, they’ve suddenly become our second largest taxpayer in Memphis, only behind FedEx, who has been operating again for five decades, right? So that that is really what is driving our economy. And just last year, our GDP eclipsed 100 billion for the first time in our history. And that does not even include X AI’s investment. So when we have done the projections, right when we’ve done the projections, what we see is that we’re going to have the one of the highest growing economies in the nation’s history in a two year period, really placing us only second behind Austin Texas, and we know what, What a juggernaut Austin Texas is for for economic growth. So we’re so excited about what the future represents. And the digital Delta now becomes one of those calling cards for our region and and it’s it’s justified, and we have proven the efficacy of what Mr. Smith envisioned for the Memphis region and and it’s, it’s bittersweet, but it’s a tremendous legacy. And he has so many legacies. But you know, knowing that the Chamber did got to partner with him on the rollout of digital delta is an incredible honor. And. And one that we’re going to continue to honor him and his contributions to our economy.

Brandon Burton 35:04
Yeah, I love that. Tie in with with the Smiths. And isn’t it amazing? Yeah, it’s

Ted Townsend 35:09
providence. I think, you know, I love to think of it that way. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 35:14
I love it. Well, obviously, two huge, impactful programs that you guys are driving there, the greater Memphis chamber. As we begin to wrap up, I wanted to ask for those listening who want to take their chamber up to the next level. What kind of tip or action item would you suggest in their efforts to do that?

Ted Townsend 35:35
Yeah, for me, you know, I don’t want to over simplify this, because the work that we do is highly complex and it’s multifaceted, but I think the underlying current is you have to listen to the business community. You have to understand with multiple touch points and an intentional engagement, what is paramount to them? What does the business community expect and need? And in times of both distress and in times of major accomplishments, because each represent new challenges and opportunities for growth. And so I take pride in the fact that we are open and we are asking for engagement and opportunities to learn what the business community needs. I would say, get out there. You know, get get active and be present and be an active listener. And most importantly, you have to act on it, and you have to show that the feedback that they are giving you is not ending up in a loop of noise, but is being thoughtfully and appropriately enacted and and that’s what has really spelled success for us. When you think about just America’s river crossing, we would not have been in a position to help win that if we had not been listening and advocating for 20 years. Yeah, and you have all of this variability in political cycles and administrations change, and that’s at every level, local, state, federal, but the one constant is always a chamber, because they’re the go to. And in our case, we’ve been around for a long time, but I think that’s true for every chamber in the community that they represent. It is, you know, you are equipped to act because you’ve been listening to what they need and and that’s a special thing that it sounds very simple, but I, you know, I engage with as many of our members as I can, and an annual basis, I want to sit with them. I want to hear we have mid mornings with Ted and we have breakfasts with a lot of TED Talks.

Brandon Burton 38:14
I thought a plan on that with this episode. I had to do it. I had to

Ted Townsend 38:17
put it in there. I hope that doesn’t hurt our scoring. But But Ted also listens, and we have a team that listens. And so I would just recommend that have as many interfaces as you possibly can, can schedule and don’t get caught up in the pageantry of events, because those are wonderful. And we celebrate every ribbon cutting, because it represents a business stream realized here in our community. But we have to do even more, and we have to show up and continually offer that support.

Brandon Burton 38:52
Yeah, I love that response, and in fact, it kind of leads into the next question I was going to ask about, and you guys are very future looking, future leaning, I would say, so as you look to the future, how do you see chambers of commerce and their purpose going

Ted Townsend 39:08
forward? Yeah, well, you know, again, I go back to challenging that status quo. When I came in as Chief Economic Development Officer, you know, having the success at the state level. I wanted that here. So we wanted to implement similar structures and strategies to to garner that kind of success. And it’s creating that culture of winning and and creating that culture you wake up every day expecting to win, and that is not in a boastful way. That is just an orientation that that I expected myself and and that has, you know, it’s really, I think, inspired the team here to understand that we can dream as big as we dare, and if we don’t, who will for Memphis. So, so we. Want to always apply innovative approaches. We love to be first in space. We love to live in the superlatives, being the best, the most, the first. And it’s not for our recognition. It is not necessarily to win, you know, the trophies, or, in this case, chamber of the year. We want that badly, but it’s because it’s the work, it’s the body of work, and it’s the impact on our community that ultimately provides that outcome and result that we expect. We expect prosper Memphis, 2030 to to see the goals hit where we will be because of Brookings research, we will be in the top quartile of those cities that we measure ourselves against. And when that happens, prosperity is shared. And if we leave anyone behind in this moment, we have failed. We hate poverty, and Memphis has long suffered from having pockets of just devastating poverty in our communities, and I will not rest, and this team at the Greater Memphis chamber won’t rest until we normalize and equalize economic prosperity for our citizenry so that we don’t have census tracts that have suffered generationally, but now you know, South Memphis is home to x ai, and those neighborhoods are getting investment, direct investment from the tax revenues that are coming in. The mayor is passing an ordinance to directionally put 25% of the net new revenues into the 38109, zip code, which has been a zip code, has seen this investment and and so many barriers for so many generations, that to me, Brandon is what a chamber is to do and to be about. And we’re gonna we’re gonna find new goals, and we’re gonna crush those as well, because we don’t rest in complacency, because our community deserves so much more.

Brandon Burton 42:08
Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, Ted, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and and learn more about how you guys are doing things there in Memphis and do their own R and D. Where would you turn them? Absolutely the best way for them to reach out.

Ted Townsend 42:24
Well, first I will say this because I’ve been the beneficiary of many of my colleagues in in the chamber work who have offered their best practices freely. And we’re an open book. This is not a time nor place to be proprietary. So we want to share everything that we have been through to help others. So the best way, I mean, my email is ttownsend@memphischamber.com you know, I always invite my mobile numbers on my business card. So that’s how open I want to be with, with our our peers and partners and community. Our website is Memphis chamber.com and we have a marketing website called MemphisMoves.com of course, we’re on all of the the platforms with social media, but MemphisChamber.com MemphisMoves.com, and then certainly my email are the best ways for us to get connected. And if there’s any research or examples of the industry reports that we put out there, or the economic impact studies that our Economic Research Group has done, most of those are on our website. And if anyone needs any assistance in that, we’re more than happy to to partner with them.

Brandon Burton 43:45
Yeah, that’s fantastic. We will get your contact information the websites or show notes to make it easy for people to find you and reach out and connect. But Ted, this has been great having you on the show. Thank you. Guys are making huge impact. It’s been fun to learn about these programs and to put a bigger spotlight on Memphis. So I wish you and your team Best of luck as chamber of the year.

Ted Townsend 44:10
We’re crossing everything that we’ve got. Can’t wait for a few weeks from now, and it’s all announced.

Brandon Burton 44:17
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2025 Chamber of the Year Finalist-Topeka Chamber with Juliet Abdel & Bob Ross

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

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

Our title sponsor for this episode is Bringing Local Back. Remember when your community could turn to a local TV station or newspaper for the latest updates and affordable ads? Those days may be fading, but the need for local connection remains. That’s why we created Bringing Local Back, a game changing platform that restores the local visibility and advertising power to your community. It’s more than just tech. It’s about driving engagement and creating new revenue for your chamber. Ready to see the future visit bringinglocalback.com to schedule your demo today. This is the future of local commerce.

You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2025 ACCE chamber, the year finalist series. And as our guest for this episode, we have Juliet Abdel and Bob Ross with the Greater Topeka Partnership. Juliet serves as the president of the Greater Topeka Chamber, making history as the first woman to lead the organization since its founding in 1933 she’s recognized among the top 1% of chamber executives nationwide, and contributes her expertise to various leadership and advisory boards, including the ACCE and Leadership Program of the Rockies. Juliet’s commitment to community service is evident through her involvement with organizations like the American Heart Association’s Go Red program and women of heart, as well as her service on the US Chamber board of directors. She holds a Master’s Degree in International Studies and has authored publications on female empowerment and entrepreneurship. Juliet strategic leadership has earned statewide and national recognition as she is multilingual, speaking English, Arabic and Turkish. Bob is the Chief Marketing Officer for the greater Topeka partnership, and he plays a key role in promoting economic growth and community development in Topeka and shiny County. A Topeka native Bob has extensive experience in merchandise allocation and planning, having spent over 15 years at Payless shoe source, including leading international operations in Israel, Peru, Thailand, Vietnam and Australia. Bob returned to Topeka in 2019 and now contributes his expertise to advancing the initiatives of the Greater Topeka Partnership, working alongside Juliet to drive growth and success for the region. But Bob Juliet, welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. We’re excited to have you on the show today. Congratulations to you guys, and your team has been selected as a chamber of the year finalist. It’s very exciting, but I wanted to give you both a chance to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and if you would humor us and share something interesting about yourself, so we can all get to know you both a little bit better. Juliet, you want to go first

Juliet Abdel 3:26
Sure. Thank you so much, Brandon for having us both on here. You’ve done an exceptionally a great job about summarizing our achievements, and it’s so well, and I’m just, you know, gawking at myself without even, you know, blinking an eye. But no super exciting time for us, of course, and to see our organization gets to this level and and to have this attention on a lot of the initiatives and programs that we have going on. So you know, you’ve already led with a lot of amazing things. So one interesting thing about myself is I’m branded as the self care boss, because I always continue to advocate for self care and holistic wellness by focusing on mental, emotional and physical well being. So in my personal life, I do a lot of speaking engagements. I lead Love Yourself boot camps. I am a published author, international radio show host, and that is what holds me personally accountable to my own personal goals in life, and having that balance as much as I can have in a crazy, busy world that we live in, I

Brandon Burton 4:27
love that. That’s awesome. Bob, how about yourself?

Bob Ross 4:31
Well, Julie, it’s a tough act to follow, but I will say, you know, probably a distinguishing factor of me, as I’m a proud dad of five kids that keep me very, very, very busy, and my per capita income very, very low, as I am constantly navigating their dreams. But it’s also part of the reason why I’m so passionate about this work, because I do believe what chambers can do is they really set the table for future generations, and so leaving the private sector after. For 20 years, it allowed me to discover an industry which is about, you know, investing in that future generation by creating a better community, you know, for my kids. And I think that that’s, you know, exciting work. And I think that often the chamber industry is not fully understood. But when people do work and discover it. They realize it’s, you know, really such an important part of the mission of, you know, handing off a better generation to the one that comes behind us. So, so, yeah, that’s a little about

Brandon Burton 5:32
me. That’s great not to put you on the spot, Bob. But what’s the range of the

Bob Ross 5:36
kids now? They are my youngest. She is 15. My oldest is 23 and so, yeah, so I got three in college, which is why I constantly feel broke. 24/7 is that I often tell people, it’s like, you think when they’re 18, that you are good. No, they just become more expensive after they’re 18. And but, yeah, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Like I said, they definitely keep me on my toes. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 6:00
that’s great. Um, well, Juliet, why don’t you tell us a little bit about the greater Topeka partnership. Just to give us an idea of size, staff, scope of work, you guys are involved with budget, just kind of set the stage.

Juliet Abdel 6:13
Sure. I’m going to give a 3000 foot perspective. I think Bob said it so well when people don’t understand what our industry is and how much of a hidden gem it is. Let’s even further add to that, these layers of differences between one community to the next and how Chambers of Commerce is operate. Our community is super unique because we have this collaborative structure that’s Brandon as the greater Topeka partnership. And what that essentially means is we have four organizations that have come together, that touch Economic Community Development, all agreeing to this economic vitality and pursuing this hope, happiness and wealth for Topeka and the surrounding region. And we do that through cross collaboration, through working together to advance initiatives and projects forward, and of course, through sharing resources, staff and even office space. So when we’re looking at the entire partnership, that’s upward of 40 employees that work here, about a $13 million budget that’s mixed between public and private sector, the individual entities that make us up, of course, represent collectively, the 1000 plus members that we have in the surrounding community, and that’s businesses, it’s nonprofits, it’s key stakeholders that you can think of and attribute to our population in that in our service areas, about 178,000 so the four organizations that came together, of course, were the Chamber of Commerce, which I lead, as you shared, that is A group that’s focused on government affairs, regulatory support, public policy efforts, connecting businesses to resources and, of course, to their elected officials. Go to pica, who will spend some time on as it relates to this specific effort, handles all of our economic development for Topeka and Shawnee County, focusing on business retention expansion, support, through incentives, through workforce development, childcare, and through different events and trainings that are designed to equip those businesses with ultimate success. Visit Topeka is focused on attracting people to our area and activating our residents and ensuring that people are aware of the things that that they can visibly go out and see, things they can do, where to stay, shop and dine and essentially invest in a community, if they’re coming from outside and if they’re internally here, then grow to appreciate the things that make us truly unique. And the fourth being downtown Topeka, which is focused on ensuring that our heartbeat for the community continues to thrive and continues to be available to those merchants that make up your traditional Main Street corridor. And so they focus on things like safety, Beautification and grants, and again, being that resource for those businesses that are in the area. So four powerful organizations that convene and collaborate and partner under the name of the greater Topeka partnership. We’re still separate organizations, separate budgets, bylaws. We just have this very incestuous relationship that I find my best to explain. I

Brandon Burton 9:13
think you did a fantastic job explaining it, and I love how you guys can take advantage of that overlap to be able to share some staff and some responsibilities, but still keep things separate. I also really like with visit Topeka, you talked about activating residents. I’m like that is such a great term to activate residents so well for the majority of our conversation today, what we want to do is focus on the two programs that were submitted on your chamber of the year application that are being highlighted, and we will dive into those with much greater detail as soon as I get back from this quick break.

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Brandon Burton 12:40
All right, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’re going to cover the two program synopsis that were included in your chamber of the year application. Lindsay, it’s my understanding you had a significant, pretty significant role in the application and pulling everything together. So I’d like to hand the microphone over to you and have you highlight, I know there’s two different programs, one about an airport, one about move to Jackson. Do you want to highlight move to Jackson for us first, and what that program, what the origins were, kind of the background and and how things have evolved to what it is today.

Brandon Burton 12:36
All right, we are back, as I mentioned before the break, we’re diving into the two programs from your chamber of the year application, Bob, I want to hand the microphone over to you and have you highlight the first program, which I believe you called choose Topeka, 2.0 you want to tell us what that’s all about.

Bob Ross 12:55
Absolutely choose Topeka began in 2019 as a program through our economic development organization, go Topeka, and you have to understand the funding model for go Topeka, we enjoy a percentage of a half cent sales tax, which generates about $5 million a year, and funding that can be used to attract businesses through traditional business attraction efforts. It’s used to invest in our small businesses to encourage growth within our community, but uniquely, we began to look at how we can deploy those dollars to enhance and attract talent. And with Topeka, it’s a unique community that, you know, I often tell people, up until 1980 this community was growing at about a 20% decennial rate, but through the 90s and 2000s our growth really stalled to really be pretty much low single digits to flat as we started moving into 2020, and choose. Topeka was a program that was initiated to reintroduce our community, not just to the state of Kansas, but to the region and across the world. And part of that was driven by the fact that Topeka is a community over the last 10 years, has radically chose to reinvest in itself, with over $500 million put into our downtown with new business growth, and we’ve done the work to rebuild our community. Now we wanted essentially people to essentially rediscover it, because as late as 2020, over 40% of our workforce chose to work in Topeka but live outside the community. So the Choose program was developed with one core component, which is offering people up to $15,000 to relocate to Topeka and Shawnee County if they were to work for one of our local employers during the pandemic, we layered in a remote work incentive, which became very popular. But then in 2023 we relaunched the program as choose Topeka 2.0 we sunset. The remote worker incentive. But decided to look at, what does Topeka need to do to compete for talent and raise awareness as our community as a place to work, live and play, and what advantages could we offer that conversation? And choose Topeka 2.0 layered in a $5,000 relocation grant to those that formerly lived in our community, $5,000 to those who are transitioning veterans, because we have nearby Fort Riley and Fort Leavenworth, as well as our own local Air National Guard and Air Force contingent here in Topeka. But then we also started to consider what other ways could we attract the workforce we need in our community? And we began to look at just the strengths our community had to offer. And we noticed immediately, Topeka has a very strong and proud Hispanic heritage. Often say there were three communities or three groups that originally founded the city back in the 19th century. They were abolitionists, freed slaves and Mexican immigrants that came to build the railroad. To build the railroad, and so for over 100 years, our Mexican community, you know, has thrived for 92 years. We have a vibrant Fiesta, and we really have a lot of Latino excellence within our city. So we decided, You know what, let’s capitalize on that, knowing that there are 100,000 Spanish speakers in the Kansas City Metro, which is 45 minutes to our east, and there’s over 300,000 Spanish speakers across the state of Kansas, how do we begin to reach out to them and let them know if you’re legally eligible to work and Topeka and Shawnee County, we want you that this is a community that’s Very welcoming that we have jobs here we are growing. And how do we begin to speak and engage with them about the programs, like our incentive programs and other assets, which makes peak a really dynamic place to live. And so what we did was is we essentially started producing all of our collateral in Spanish, including 110 page tourism and relocation guide. And then we began to also court our national media, because we enjoy a great relationship with a New Jersey based PR firm, and we began to really just talk about this intentionality with Spanish language, and that really captured a lot of interest. We were able to welcome Telemundo into our community. And October of 2023 we were able to get the Wall Street Journal here. And there was a disruptive element to a community that identified Hispanic migration is a solution to a problem, not a problem. We also worked with local nonprofits, and there’s a group called top city promise, which began to actively work with refugee groups that were legally eligible to work in the United States following the onset of the Ukraine war. And through that program, although they’re not eligible for the incentive per se, we were able to essentially come alongside them and see what we can do to connect them to employers. And that particular program brought over 200 Ukrainian refugees who had work eligibility through the United for Ukraine program, we were able to get them job placement at a 90% rate, serving important workforce needs within our community. And I will say, after our Telemundo appearance, that particular moment went viral across Spanish language, Tiktok garnering billions of views across the Spanish speaking world, and really drove a highly motivated population to find a way to Topeka. I mean, we had, within days, people showing up at our door saying, you know, knocking on our door, asking for information about how they can relocate their business to Topeka. We had one gentleman, his son and his grandfather, who have a business in New Jersey, who said they heard about Topeka is a great place for Hispanics, and they wanted to see what they could do, and so we had to rapidly spin up our Spanish speaking staff to be able to engage these communities also address some misconceptions about the program, and, you know, really kind of harness that momentum. It has proven to be incredibly successful, to the point where the Brookings Report released data at the spring of this year, which showed that 99% of Topeka is growth over the last year, was from foreign born groups, and that’s a tremendous movement, because when you do live in Kansas, you’re in a community which is fantastic, but we’re often considered flyover country. So you know, trying to get a mobilized workforce from around the country that is considering where they want to live, getting on their radar was the first hurdle. So we tried to activate every vehicle at our disposal. And so I think between the incentives and our foreign language outreach, we were able to really make a dent and reverse a trend some additional metrics showing how the progress has. Worked. You know that decline in population or stagnation has been reversed to the point in 2023 we led the state of Kansas in population growth. We now boast one of the top 10 housing markets in the United States, and in the fall of 2023 we ended up rising up to be the number one housing market in the United States, according to the Wall Street Journal and realtor.com so this, this intentionality focused with, you know, a pretty bold use of funding really helped push us forward we’re now. One of our biggest concerns is, how do we keep up with the housing demand? Because Topeka was not quite ready for the shift in momentum that we enjoyed. That was

Brandon Burton 20:40
going to be one of my questions. There’s going to be these the fallout from such growth so quickly. And I love how you said you took what may be considered a problem in some communities and really seeing it as a strength, as an asset and an asset. But when you have that kind of rapid growth overnight, that that creates other problems, right? But absolutely, but problems we’re all happy to deal with because it means progress. So I can imagine, when there’s in most communities, there’s a pretty large segment of the community that has a certain level of comfort with how things are, and then they see a disruption like this that comes in, even though it’s a good thing that are going to be kind of that squeaky wheel in a community. I’m curious, where was there any attention that needed to be paid to the policy side of this to make sure that everything Bob talked about making sure people are legally able to work in the community? Juliet, what what was the approach from the policy standpoint? Yeah,

Juliet Abdel 21:43
that’s such a great question, and it’s, it’s always one of those where explaining the structure really explains how we approach everything, because we know that things naturally happen as initiatives are are brought forward. So there are three things that I just want to quickly unpack and all of these amazing comments that Bob threw out there. One is, of course, from a policy perspective, we’re here for our business community and make sure that that it is favorable for their continued growth and for them to continue to thrive in the space that they’re in. And we know a crucial component to that is things, not only in the space of economic development, but to really pare that down even further. That touches workforce development. It touches housing and it touches cost of living, and that’s all of those marry into this economic prosperity piece that we spoke to earlier. So this initiative was one, as Bob was sharing earlier. You know, it really was focused and came out of our Go economic development arm, but it touched a number of different sectors in our community, as he shared, right the military component transitional soldiers that touches our chamber, because we have a military Relations Council that’s purely designed to build this defense ecosystem to support with workforce development opportunities for those that have served. I mean, Kansas has over seven different installations across the state, and we have, of course, our Kansas Air National Guard that’s here, are 1/90 refueling wing, and then Forbes field. So it naturally had that overlap that’s there. The component of the housing piece is super interesting, because I don’t know what community isn’t feeling a strain on housing. We just have had such a boom in all places possible. And so to that, you know, to that end, we’ve always continued to advocate that we need to come up with simpler and easier solutions for those that are looking to do business in our community, to find it easy to enter our market. And what are those things that we can do to make it more of an opportune environment for someone to invest in building new homes or building homes that are the missing middle we have a number of our businesses that support a diversity of housing. So it’s not just one type of housing. It is all of them that we are looking to try and continue to see come live, the single family homes, the condos, affordable housing, and the whole gamut. Because it’s people become economically more mobile. They they also transition into different types of rentals or home ownership. And then the component of you know this perception is everyone’s reality sometimes. So semantics are really important in this conversation. That’s why we specifically worded it as legally eligible individuals that are here because we know that all types of residents contribute to our pipelines, but we also rely on a significant number of workers that come from outside of the US to feed into our different industries. And so our continued approach has been we need immigration reform that makes sense, while we understand that we want to protect our nation and our interests and and keep as much focus on the process as possible, and really having a great structure. There is a backlog on worker visa permits. There are times where individuals are here and they’re here working, but it’s been delayed in their process to continue to. Send out, and that creates uncertainty. And anytime there’s uncertainty, it causes disruption in our businesses and their ability to kind of forecast moving forward as well. So I know that touches a few different things, but I wanted to throw it out there, because as Bob was sharing, I was like, Oh, this is another piece we we overlap, and that that relationship that we have helps us in making sure the messaging is appropriate, and we’re thinking of all the things that we can

Brandon Burton 25:25
possible. Yeah, I like to think of it as job security at the chamber. You know, you guys create a great program that drives, you know, workforce development and economic development, but it creates other things that you need to address now, you know, like we talked about with housing and and things like that, immigration reform, things that that need to be addressed and and keeps the the relevancy for what the chamber does. But let’s, I love that program. Let’s shift gears and and turn the focus on the second program. Bob, if you want to highlight what the second program is, you guys submitted on your application?

Bob Ross 26:01
Yeah, absolutely. You know, at Topeka, like many communities around the country, you know, back in the 1980s this city invested in the development of a real destination Mall. It was a million square foot piece of retail real estate. Vanna White came to cut the ribbon on it. It really embodied everything that the 80s and 90s and early 2000s represented in terms of mall traffic and became a real draw across the state, like most malls across the country, towards the 2000 10s and going through the pandemic, that piece of real estate in our community, which anchors a billion dollar commercial corridor for us really started to see distress. You know, shopping patterns were changing. That million square foot piece of retail real estate began to decline to the point where we only had about 25% occupancy in it, and we had a more predatory real estate developer purchase the mall post pandemic, without really the intention of developing the asset for long term success. So our community recognized it as a potential real challenge, not just to you know, our continued ability to attack or attract and retain talent, but also to really project ourselves as a destination across the region. And we were fortunate that in 2023 one of our major employers, advisors Excel, saw the potential in that real estate to make it a development project which could enhance their own growth plans, but also give back to the community that gave them success. So advisors Excel is one of the largest financial marketing firms and wealth management groups in the country. They have over 1000 employees, and they are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, and their rapid growth has led to increasing demand for how do they keep up with the ability to work from work and provide office space for all their staff within Topeka, their founders identified the mall is a solution to this challenge, and they purchased that mall with the intention of redeveloping it into 400,000 square feet of office space as well as 600,000 square feet mixed use dining restaurant lifestyle space. Because as also, offices and employers across the country are figuring out how to incentivize workers to be back in the office and be happy about it. They really saw the ability of creating this new mixed use campus as a way of really rewarding their employees for being back in the office space, contributing to that sense of corporate culture, but providing the amenities that they need. So now how the partnership features in this particular conversation, we began to think of ways that we could enhance this effort and draw awareness for this retail redevelopment project, and what our team decided to do was to look at how we do our annual meeting and re imagine that is a way of being a part of this catalytic announcement of a new future for Westridge Mall. So we took our annual meeting, we moved it into the mall, and we really created a 1980s themed mall party, and brought in a popular 1980s pop star, Tiffany, known for her mall tour during that era, to really headline our event. And everyone came and themed attire. You know, you had stonewashed jeans and people tight rolling their jeans and neon T shirts. And we also worked with our local businesses to essentially re skin the food court so that it would look like a 1980s food court. And this really proved to be an exciting event for our community. It normally annual meetings tend to be kind of closed off events where people buy their tables and we still. Had that element involved in ours, but since it was held in the food court, the programming and the experience was also open to the public for the first time. So you did buy tables as normal, but the public was invited to kind of stand outside of the event zone and enjoy the the concert, hear about the community’s progress, and it really proved to be an exciting way of kind of jump starting that mall project and raising awareness for it on a national scale. As our as advisors Excel and their team looks to reintroduce that property to national retailers and bringing businesses back. So I always like to use it as a way of encouraging chambers of commerce across the country to get creative with their programming and see how even existing things that they’re doing can be leveraged, leveraged or reimagined, to provide added value to their businesses and economic development

Brandon Burton 30:56
projects. That’s awesome. I’m having all these flashbacks in my mind of the 80s and what the malls look like in their hat. So I’m curious, did you guys serve hot dog on the stick and Orange Julius?

Bob Ross 31:06
We did. We absolutely had an we did. We had an Orange Julius sought. We also set up a GTP shots the instead of glamor shots, where people could get a feather boa and get their their pictures. So we brought in a DeLorean from Back to the Future. We really created a pretty exciting event, especially for those that grew up in the 80s and 90s. It it re awoken people how much they loved having the mall space, and got people excited about the project, because we know it’s going to be a couple of years before this mall gets rebuilt and redeveloped. So it got people really engaged and looking for ways to be a part of the momentum. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 31:43
So Is there plans to continue? You talked about enhancing the efforts that this mixed use development space looks like as a chamber. Do you guys have continued plans to try to continue drawing a focus there and keep that excitement up for the development

Bob Ross 31:59
Absolutely. Yeah, the partnership. We’re fortunate, because we do, you know, share assets across all four entities. And so we actually do leverage our ability for graphic design, for marketing, to be able to support our key economic development projects as a way of enhancing how go to pica. Can invest in projects without investing dollars. So we work very closely with the team of advisors Excel and the mall management team creating collateral which allows them to sell the community and to help them to tell the story of whites. Peak is a great place for retail and restaurant to invest in. And we also work very closely with those retail site selectors as they visit, by meeting those teams, and once again, just talking up why coming back to this mall and coming back to this community at this time is a great opportunity, because retail and dining isn’t always a focus for economic development groups like go Topeka, but We see these kind of passive ways to engage that are not necessarily dollar incentive driven, is an important way of contributing to that ecosystem, because if you don’t have great retail and dining, it’s hard to get the people to move and it’s hard to get the businesses to relocate. So we’ve gotten very engaged and just actually led a tour last week of them all, and spoke about what this project means for our community.

Brandon Burton 33:24
That’s awesome. I love it. And the idea of using your annual meeting as that delivery system to highlight the development in the community, I think is such a great idea. And I’ve seen other chambers utilize their annual meeting for similar purposes, and probably not to this scale, but, but it’s a great, great tool to utilize. As we begin to wrap things up, I wanted to to ask you both for chambers listening who want to take their organization up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you both have to offer and trying to accomplish that goal.

Juliet Abdel 34:00
You know, I always say the sky is the limit in our industry. We are we’re so unique and fortunate that we can get creative and we can be nimble and agile and and and our hands being involved in so many parts of our community allow us to do that and really to have champions that surround those efforts. So don’t be afraid to kind of be bold and look at look and seek those opportunities. And then the other part of it is for us to continue to be relevant. It’s super necessary for us to take those bold opportunities and not continue to do what we’ve always done, because what was working decades ago, or, you know, years ago, isn’t what works today, and if we continue to do the same things over and over again, then we start losing our relevancy. And so to be and continue to be relevant, we have to have a pulse for what’s in the community, and be brave enough to take those bold, bold actions to guide and steer those conversations

Brandon Burton 34:59
Absolutely. Great, Bob, what thoughts might you have to share?

Bob Ross 35:02
Yeah, I would just say, just I speak to a lot of chambers across the country about the idea of what the partnership model represents, and I think there is incredible value in getting those kind of community stakeholder organizations in each city together, even if they’re not a part of a formal partnership, to really align on shared mission and value. So getting your main street, your tourism, your eco Devo, your chamber of commerce around the table, figuring out your strategy and working together to advance with one voice. What I found that hurt Topeka during those years in which population stagnated, you had each of these different verticals, all kind of marching to their own drum, all kind of fighting for their own turf. And we hit a point in our community’s growth where we needed to come together, and our business leaders pushed for it, and so that created the partnership, where it forced every entity to give up a certain amount of authority and autonomy, but allowed each one to now activate more powerfully because they’re not operating alone. They’re able to share costs, they’re able to share vision, and so even if a chamber is not able to create a partnership model, just be very intentional about seeking out and working with those stakeholders in your community so that you don’t have to do this alone, and that everyone is working together off the same script. And I think when you can do that, and you’re all singing along to the same song, your entire community is going to thrive as a result.

Brandon Burton 36:29
Yeah, absolutely. Juliet, I’ll focus this question to you, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward.

Juliet Abdel 36:41
You know, I think what we’re seeing now already is this review of membership and investment in our organizations, and the older concept of, you know, you join and you get as much as you put into it, it’s becoming increasingly less likely to be the case because, because more and more people are occupied running their business day in and day out, and so the ability for us to become more of an extension of their team, continue to pivot and do things for them ahead of when it impacts them, and provide them solutions to them ahead of time. I think that’s where we’re seeing most success in our industry is continuing to be relevant, continuing to be forward thinking, and continuing to know that it’s not this join you have to come to every single thing, but it’s invest instead, into what opportunities around you that continue to ensure that you thrive, and that that would probably be where I feel the direction is, you know, There’s a I’ll point to, and this is because here’s my board plugin for ACC. I’ll point to the horizon initiative that was just released. And if you’re not privy to this, the study that was conducted was after, you know, over a decade from the last time that we had a study, and the idea was to try and look at what does the future of chambers look like, and how do we continue to operate? But some of the contents of that study really focused on being catalytic, convening and champion your community, and in operating in all of those spaces simultaneously as an organization that continues to breathe life into into the populations that we serve. So if you haven’t already done so, pick that horizon up, because it has some really good nuggets of the things that you can be doing and things to watch out for and really start to incorporate into the future.

Brandon Burton 38:31
Yeah, for anybody who’s is just living under a rock and doesn’t know horizon, look at the original one from 10 years ago, and look at 2.0 and you’ll, you’ll kind of be blown away to to read the the first horizon initiative and and to realize how spot on it really was, and if we look at that forward with the 2.0 I anticipate similar accuracy. So, so before we let you go. I wanted to give you both an opportunity to share any contact information for people who may want to reach out and learn more about the programs that have been highlighted, or just in general, how you guys are doing things there in Topeka, what would be the best way for individuals to reach out and connect with you both?

Juliet Abdel 39:16
So I will, I’ll start, and then I’ll throw it at you, Bob, but GreaterTopekaPartnership.com has all the information about all these organizations and the functions of what we do and how we operate, also has links to the any external affiliate entities that we have underneath us, as our social media does as well. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and several other platforms. I will say personally, you can find me on LinkedIn, Juliet Abdel and I always am open to new friends and more friends, and that is the way that we continue to support one another, is by continuing to grow our network, sharing those best practices and seeing seeing when we need that support, if there’s others that can help lend that. So you can find me on LinkedIn. You can also find me on Instagram at Ms. Juliet Abdel, or on Facebook, and happy to connect with you on any of those platforms.

Brandon Burton 40:05
Perfect, Bob. How about yourself? Where can people find you or reach out to you?

Bob Ross 40:09
Absolutely. I encourage anyone they can reach out to me directly at bob.ross@topekapartnership.com as Juliet said, you’re welcome to also reach out over LinkedIn. You know, we’re just happy to use our experience to help other chambers really kind of solve problems. And we’ve had to solve a lot of problems ourselves over the last, you know, seven and 10 years. So anything we can do to kind of, you know, share from that with our our peers is always a welcome conversation to have. So I encourage anyone to reach out, and we’re happy to have a conversation.

Brandon Burton 40:39
Very good. We’ll be sure to get all that in our show notes for this episode as well, to make it easy to connect. But wanted to thank you both for spending time with us today on chamber chat podcast, for highlighting these programs and and really the great impact you guys are making there in the Topeka area, and continue to make those, those big, bold moves and continue impacting your communities. You guys are doing a great job, and I wish you guys Best of luck this chamber of

Bob Ross 41:06
the year. Thank you. Thank you.

Brandon Burton 41:09
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2025 Chamber of the Year Finalist-Grand Rapids Chamber with Rick Baker

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

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2025 ACCE Chamber of the Year Finalist Series, and our guest for this episode is Rick Baker, representing the Grand Rapids Chamber. Rick is a seasoned Chamber of Commerce professional with a career spanning over three decades, beginning in 1988 as the director of finance and membership at the Rochester Area Chamber in Minnesota. Rick went on to lead chambers in Newton, Iowa and in the Iowa, Illinois Quad Cities home to major corporations like Maytag and John Deere. Since April of 2011 Rick has served as president and CEO of the Grand Rapids chamber. His passion for supporting the business community was shaped by his upbringing in a family of business owners. Rick holds a degree from the upper Iowa University and earned his IOM certification from the University of Colorado, Boulder Rick, we’re excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. And first of all, I want to say congratulations to you and your team is being selected as a 2025 chamber of the year finalist. But I wanted to give you a chance to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Rick Baker 2:24
Oh, well, you know, thank you for having me, and I love that you said seasoned. I think that’s a nice way of seeing the old guy. It’s been a, you know, it’s been an awesome career. Otherwise I wouldn’t still be here, right? And we’re honored to be a finalist for the chamber of the year, and our colleagues from Topeka and Memphis run some amazing chambers of commerce as well. So just being a finalist and with them is quite an honor. So that’s something interesting about myself. You know? What people might not know about me is I’m also a licensed Merchant Marine Captain, and so I can drive some pretty big, pretty big yachts and boats on mostly on Lake Michigan.

Brandon Burton 3:13
Very cool. So little fun fact, I didn’t know this until just recently. You know, we’re in this world right now where tariffs are such a hot topic, and I’d seen in your bio that you were part of the Coast Guard, and I didn’t realize the Coast Guard was initially set up to collect tariffs from imports coming into the United States. So when you say Merchant Marine, that makes even more sense to me. Now I don’t know where I missed that in in my schooling, my education, but I found that interesting. Yeah, yeah. Well, tell us a little bit about the the Grand Rapids chamber, just to set the stage for our conversation today. You know, give us an idea of the size staff, scope of work, things you guys are involved with, budget, just kind of prepare us for our discussion. Yeah.

Rick Baker 4:02
So we are on a growth trajectory as a Chamber of Commerce. We’ve been very intentional about having our eyes set on a 10 year plan, and we’re 2028. Is that we will have reached that 10 year mark when we started our journey. We are currently, this current year, we’re about $6 million in annual revenue. We have 4445 staff people on our team. So we have a great group of people on our team that deliver some high quality programming and high quality interactions with our members. And one of our values is, you know, member experience

Brandon Burton 4:44
Absolutely. So as far as the organization goes, Are you guys strictly chamber? Do you have that it’s the tourism aspect or economic development, or what is the scope of work look

Rick Baker 4:56
like? Yeah, we are strictly chamber. We are. Master organizations, which, like in many cities, we were the chamber, actually started the economic development organization and the tourism bureau, but spun them out into separate organizations. The three of us work very well together. We have very specific lane of work that we do in our communities. I serve on both of those boards for both those organizations, but they are independent and separate organizations. So we are strictly Chamber of Commerce. We’re 137 years old this year, and very true to our original mission of being, you know, relentless advocates for our business community.

Brandon Burton 5:36
Awesome, very cool. Well, that that definitely helps us with the setting the stage, and as I do with these chamber of the year finalist episodes, I like to spend the majority of our discussion time on the two projects that you guys submitted on your chamber of the year application. I think there’s a lot to be learned from those projects, as you’re obviously making an impact in your community to be noticed on a national stage. So we’ll dive in much deeper on those two programs as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Brandon Burton 9:49
All right, Rick, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break today, we’re diving in on the two programs that you guys submitted on your chamber of the year application. I don’t know if. You have a preference on which one we cover first, but I’ll, I’ll let you decide with which which program you want to dive into.

Rick Baker 10:06
Sure. Let’s talk a little bit about the first one is our office space itself, which sounds maybe a little bit funny. We started a journey back in 2018 that kind of referenced in my earlier marks on a 10 year journey of reinventing ourselves as an organization, and part of that had to do with moving to a new office. Our previous office space was very traditional. It was like where the employees came to work. It wasn’t a great opportunity for our members to engage with us. And so as we thought about our reinvention and rebranding of us as an organization, it felt like a great opportunity for us to rethink how we work, and I asked our design team that we hired, can our office space actually be a benefit of chamber membership versus an overhead cost for our organization. And so what we designed and what we have now is very much of a collaborative work environment. We have a work cafe on the first floor. It’s a coffee shop on the first floor. Our members drop in and work, and they come in between meetings, and it’s pop in, you know, beer from one of our local breweries in the refrigerator for late afternoon if somebody feels like they would like to have a beer. And then on this second floor, we have an a series of meeting rooms, and we had such high utilization that, like, two years ago, then we did an expansion and 5000 square foot expansion, and added additional meeting rooms, and we’ve seen our utilization triple. A lot of businesses. We are literally now the center, the hub of business activity for our business community, which was our goal to have our the leadership teams of our major corporations and our small businesses, mid sized businesses, coming in and using our space for their strategic planning. Nothing fills my bucket more than seeing the leadership team of one of our companies, whether it’s our largest corporation or down to, you know, smaller company, their team in their white boarding like, where are they going? Where’s their future? Is it we’re better placed to do that than at your chamber of commerce?

Brandon Burton 12:28
That’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve not heard of this type of a model with the office space before. Is this something that you’d seen somewhere? Is it just, you know, one of those ideas that come to you when you’re in the shower? Or how did this come to be?

Rick Baker 12:44
I get my best ideas when I’m driving. I call it windshield time, you know, brainstorming. And I think sometimes my staff gets a little nervous when they know I’m going to be in the car for very long, because I always come back with great ideas, right, right? But, you know, I mean, co working space in is not something that’s unusual for a lot of communities, but for a chamber, I think you know, making your office be the the co working space for your community is maybe unusual or unique. And I think you know, teaming up with our architectural design team, and you know them knowing what our our vision was for our space, that it be something that our members could benefit from. You know, they really helped us through a process to identify what could that look like. Now, they also made, made us aware, very much aware. And I think this is probably very typical of a lot of chambers, as they studied us in our old space and watched how our employees worked. You know, everyone had their own office. Everyone had their cubicle that was assigned to them. And, you know, in the in the design language, they were like, this, real estate, you’re tying up real estate, but half of but you’re only there half the time, yeah. And so you’ve got all of this real estate tied up, and your employees are coming and going, and so that allowed us to rethink how we worked as well as we now, no one, including me, has an office that’s assigned to me. There are spaces that I can go and work and be in an office environment, but it’s not assigned to me. I don’t have pictures up, I don’t have things that you know that designate that this belongs to Rick. So it allows us to have more of our space focused on our members and less tied up in real estate that’s being used half the time.

Brandon Burton 14:40
So I’ve heard of chambers doing co working spaces, for sure, but not having their office space be that that canvas right for that co working space. So I think it’s a very unique idea with 45 staff. Was that a hard idea to get across the staff that you. Won’t have your designated real estate within the office as you as you termed it before,

Rick Baker 15:05
yeah, we went through a process. You know, early on, when we first moved in to our space here, with the team that was kind of converting, and our, one of our office supply or office manufacturing companies has a process to help you actually go through that. And for, you know, there’s protocols that you, you know, you create that are kind of basically the unspoken rules of how you operate. You know, when you sit at a spot and then, like, how do you leave it for the next person? So we did a lot of training with our employees. Like, this is what to expect. And no, the conversion was actually fairly easy. There’s, you know, there’s, it took a little while in the very beginning, and I actually think it positioned us very well when, when all of us had to deal with covid and work remotely, we were all used to working with our backpack and being remote anyway, basically. And so it really helped us adapt quickly when it came to covid.

Brandon Burton 16:09
So that that question was on my mind, you know, first of all, it sounds like this is a new space for you. It wasn’t an existing office space. Is that correct?

Rick Baker 16:19
Right? It’s new. We moved down, you know, a couple few blocks from where we were previously, out of our Okay.

Brandon Burton 16:27
So then my next question was, with the new office space, when did you guys make this move, and did you have to deal with covid During that time, and, and I’m sure that had some, you know, maybe complications, but also benefits, as you mentioned, with already being structured with that kind of office structure. But what did you guys see through that experience?

Rick Baker 16:47
Our original move in here was 2018 March of 2018 so we were in here for two, two full years before 2020 came around in Michigan. You know, everything was completely closed down during covid, and so we were not able to come into our space. We were not able to have members in our space at all during 2020, for almost a whole year, then when we had to actually designate because, like I said, we have our work, work campaign, which is a coffee shop. Then we have meeting room space. They’re all designated differently at the state of Michigan during that time. And so we were able to open pieces of it at different times. And so yeah, it was a quite a journey. What we found after covid was the utilization even higher when people started coming back to work, when we did open up, and that that drove our expansion in 2022 Yeah, and a number of companies, because some of those companies were actually shrinking their footprints a little bit, and so leaning on us more for meeting spaces and things like that.

Brandon Burton 18:00
Yeah. And I’m sure things had to be thought through as far as, like sanitizing a workspace before you leave. And, you know, the stuff we don’t want to think about anymore. So yeah, we won’t dwell on that part of it so much. But I like the idea of you guys being so well positioned, you know, ahead of covid to as these changes happen that, you know, other offices kind of scaled down, and people working from home, but maybe at home, they don’t really have a space to work from, so to be able to utilize their chamber membership to come to the chamber office and have space there to be able to work do you see a number of people that come consistently, like every day or multiple times a week, or what’s that? That info like

Rick Baker 18:44
we do, we do have some, what we call frequent flyers. We have folks that are here almost every day, if not every day. And we’ve seen, you know, kind of unintention, not necessarily the intent of our our thoughts originally, but have embraced it. We’ve seen kind of some incubation of some small businesses that that’s then as they finally got their own space, they moved out. We’ve seen that multiple times where, you know, companies that got started, and then they finally get to 345, employees, and they find their own they get their own office space, and move out, and they still come back and use our meeting rooms. But God, we have some companies that are here quite a bit, and we’re actually thinking next, what’s next for us? And we’ve done a we’ve met with our frequent flyers, especially to find out, like, what else could we do to make this even more valuable to you as a chamber member,

Brandon Burton 19:42
yeah. So I love hearing the stories of incubators getting started and spun off. And I know for a lot of these incubators, these brand new businesses, having that physical space and even an address is so important for them getting started. Are they? Able to utilize the address the building, or how is that factored into utilizing the space?

Rick Baker 20:06
So actually, right now, no, they do not use it as their mailing address. That is something we’re thinking about as an add on benefit to probably a cost to some of those that are more frequent flyers, but they can do pretty much everything other than, you know, have access to the space you know, during our office hours, and they don’t have it as their mailing address unless we work out a special when we that’s kind of our next phase,

Brandon Burton 20:37
yeah, so from a tactical standpoint, do people Reserve meeting rooms and spaces? You mentioned they’re classified in different areas. So is that something they go online and book a room? Or how does that work?

Rick Baker 20:53
Yeah, we have, we have a person on our team that manages all of the meeting room space, because we now have like, 15 meeting rooms. And you know, it’s so and most of them are full every day, all day, with different clients. And so it’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of people, lot of energy, lot of activity in this in our office, which I love. And so it takes, you know, we had to have a person on our team that could manage all of that, make sure that they got a good customer experience, and provide them, you know, with the room set up and there’s, like I said, there’s about 15 different meeting rooms, and they’re laid out differently, different sizes, depending on what the need is of our members,

Brandon Burton 21:37
yeah, very cool for a chamber listening who might be interested in doing something similar. Has is there big lessons you guys learned in setting up this kind of an office space that they might want to take note of before venturing into something like this?

Rick Baker 21:56
Um, you know, I think, I think a lot of it depends on the the team in place, and are they willing to give up their actual designated office. It takes, you know, some learning, and you know, willingness to do that. I guess you could have that. It would just cause you would just have to have much more square footage to be able to accommodate both, you have to be willing to have this level of activity in your office. To have there is a lot of activity, and there’s a certain level of now, our team loves it, you know. And most a lot of the people that have been hired in, they like this environment. They know what they’re coming into. So yeah, but there’s a certain level of stress when you have guests, you know, like, if you have guests in your home for a weekend, you know that there’s, like, a it’s you can’t just relax and sit around like you normally would. And so there’s a just a little extra level of activity.

Brandon Burton 23:03
Call it attention. Yeah, you’re more attention.

Rick Baker 23:07
Be willing to work with and have around you. I love the energy our team. Loves the energy the interactions that happen in our with between our members and our staff and between members that are in our space. We hear that all the time. It’s like, oh my god, it’s a great one of our members referred to us as the town square like this is where you go if you want to see people that you’re you’ve been trying

Brandon Burton 23:31
to connect with. That’s awesome. I love that. So you’d mentioned that this is a benefit of membership. Is it a membership tier? Are all members welcome to? How does that structure work?

Rick Baker 23:44
So all members are welcome into our space. And then it’s a different membership levels of access to meeting rooms. And then maybe, you know, at the highest level, not have to pay for the meeting rooms in addition to your membership. So you get x number of utilizations a year based on your membership investment

Brandon Burton 24:03
levels. Yeah, very cool. Well, let’s shift gears to the the other program that you guys submitted on your application, if you’d like to to introduce with that program, is

Rick Baker 24:13
about, yeah. So like many chambers, you know, we are, we’re always working to create a community that’s vibrant and attractive and will attract people and attract business and and we’ve been on a journey here in Grand Rapids for number of years, and we’re so we’re at our next phase. And so it’s what we presented, was a couple of transformational projects. Is how we refer to them, as they’re transformational for our community. In those two projects are 14,000 seat empathy outdoor amphitheater, a entertainment venue, and that is in our downtown, and then a professional soccer stadium, which is also in our downtown. Area again, trying to continue our journey of creating high energy, high traffic, kind of attractions that then support our entertainment businesses, the so you know, hospitality businesses that we have in our downtown area as well as, you know, find, you know, adding additional tools in our toolbox, like, if you might say, for attracting great talent to our region.

Brandon Burton 25:29
Yeah, definitely that that place making aspect of making Grand Rapids a great place to live and entertain and and all of that. So you’d mentioned you guys are working through like this 10 year vision. Was there a capital campaign associated with that to execute on these projects? Or, I imagine the soccer stadium has something to do with the soccer team. Would would help finance with that. But how’s it coming

Rick Baker 25:57
together? Yeah, so our, you know, big piece of what we had to do was part of the capital stack to make these projects a reality. Was what we’ve used previously for some of our other projects as a portion of our hotel motel tax. And we needed to do through multiple steps, and part of that was getting legislation passed at the state level that would allow us to increase the hotel, motel tax that we use. We had to get approval first at this local, city and county boards so that we could go and ask for our legislature to change our ability to increase our tax and once we got through each one of those steps, we had to run a ballot campaign with our local voters to get approval for the increase. And of course, there’s a lot of messaging and a lot of things that you need to do to make sure that they understand it’s like, this is a hotel, motel, tax. It’s an attacks on your property. It’s not, you know, there’s

Brandon Burton 27:06
people your tax and they freak out a little bit. Yeah, people

Rick Baker 27:09
see tax increase and they, you know, there’s a certain reaction that you get immediately. And so there was a lot of work that our team had to do with partners in the community to make sure that the message was very clear, and people understood what the what they were supporting, and what they were helping to invest in for the future of our community. And so we were pleased that we were able to get a yes at each one of those steps along the way. There was a lot of pressure and timing that that was important because you, you know, you design like significantly, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investment and costs change quickly, you know, a few years delay and the changes, the costs can change. And so we wanted to keep things moving, and so that the estimates for costs were accurate and we didn’t have any surprises later.

Brandon Burton 28:06
Yeah, when this is part of a 10 year plan and vision like, man, a lot of the costs have changed within that 10 year span. But it’s got to be very satisfying to see this, you know, coming from a dream or vision, a plan, to to something that’s materializing. What’s the timeline look like for completion on the amphitheater in the stadium?

Rick Baker 28:27
Yeah, so the amphitheater is well under construction. It started sooner. That was the first project that we got going on from a construction standpoint, and the first concert will be in May of 2026 Okay, and so, you know, there,

Brandon Burton 28:48
do you know who’s coming with? Not yet, okay, yeah, we might be able to pre sell some tickets here.

Rick Baker 28:56
I would think that it would be quite an honor for any entertainer to be the first entertainer in a new venue. And we have a, you know, our we have a great contract partnership with the organization that runs our arena and our convention center, and they’re now contracted to run the amphitheater and using Live Nation to, you know, work all the deals with the different entertainment groups. So, yeah, I’m sure that’ll be exciting, and it’ll be a hot ticket for sure.

Brandon Burton 29:29
Absolutely sounds very exciting. Yeah,

Rick Baker 29:33
soccer stadium is a little bit they’re just starting construction now. They’re doing groundwork and site work. They just started it recently, and so that’ll be about a two year build out before that’s completed some of the other steps that are coming along with that project. And we haven’t announced the the name of the team yet, you know, or team ownership, any of that kind of stuff. And so we’ve, I think, you know, we’ve been phasing it out, just. Kind of keep the attention and excitement, but we’ll be doing that very soon, because it’s important, because there’s material that needs to be bought and you want it to align with the colors of the team and right like that. And so that stuff will be coming along in the near future.

Brandon Burton 30:16
Yeah, that’s really cool. Well, Rick, as we begin to wrap things up here. I wanted to ask on behalf of you know, chambers listening, who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you suggest for them as they try to work towards that goal

Rick Baker 30:35
while we I think for us, what really has helped us as an organization, and that be at the beginning of this whole journey of re reinventing ourselves, as I mentioned back in 2018 and we also started implementing Eos, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And there’s other operating systems out there Eos, what I like about it is, it is not hard, you know, it’s very simple. It gives you a set of tools. But what the most important thing it does is it gets the whole team laser focused on the on the goal. You know, everyone is aligned. And, you know, here’s who we are as an organization. Our values are alive. They’re not just something on a piece of paper. They’re on our wall, but they’re not just on the wall. We live them. I hear people on our team stay them, you know, they’ll reference them, you know, regularly. So I know that they’re on the top of mind for them. We use it for hiring and hiring, promotion, recognition, to have everything to make sure that our value is alive and well. But the long game, they understand where we’re going and then, but more importantly, they understand why, and that’s important part of it. You know, we can set a goal for something, but if people don’t understand, aren’t bought into the why that’s our goal, or why are we going this direction, or why do we need our, you know, our revenue, to be this amount, then it’s harder for them to maybe buy into the mission. And I think what we’ve seen as organizations, and I’m sure the other chambers that are listening, we’re able to, we’re able to attract really high quality talent, because especially it seems like the workforce right now wants to be part of a mission that they’re excited about, and so we have an advantage a little bit. We may not always be able to compete in the marketplace for wages against some of our largest employers, but we’ve been able to attract people because they buy into the mission in the in the focus of the organization. And we have a we’re able to do this work because we have an incredible team of people. I just get out of their way, you know? They we get the right people and let them do their work and bring their expertise to the table, and it works out really well for our members and our organization and our community. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 33:10
it’s super important to be clear on that that mission and purpose, and that’s going to drive people in the right direction, for sure. Oh, Rick, I like asking everyone I have on the show about the future. How do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Rick Baker 33:29
Yeah, that’s, yeah, that’s the age old question, right? You know? And I think the ACC has done incredible work with the Horizon Report and updating that again now it’s incredible how accurate the last one was to project out where we are now 10 years later, and so that’s been a great resource. I think our business communities and in our every city around the country need us now more than ever. We should be a business imperative, and that’s our goal here in Grand Rapids, we need to be a business imperative for every business in town with a pace of change the challenges that are coming, the how quickly those challenges are coming, the disruption that we have. Our members need us tremendously to help stabilize the environment that they’re in, and a lot of the growth, the the excitement that happens in this country that we all love is happening at the local level. We’re driving it this. It’s not being top down, driven from, you know, from Washington, DC, it’s bottom up driven now, top can affect it and make our jobs harder, but we can, we can push through it, and we will help navigate. We’re a resilient, you know, people here in the United States, in our cities, and so that’s to me, I think. You know, now more than ever and into the future, we are, if we’re doing the right kind of work for our members, we’ll be a business imperative for them. Yeah. I

Brandon Burton 35:10
love that. I love how you said it’s your job to help stabilize the environment that these businesses are trying to conduct their business in. And that’s

Rick Baker 35:18
thrives. Business thrives unstable and predictable. The unstable, unpredictable is where it’s like, oh my gosh, what are we doing? And so we can bring some stability to them and help them see what’s coming and be prepared for it. Then we become very valuable to them.

Brandon Burton 35:36
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Rick, I wanted to give you a chance to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you and either learn more about the programs you talked about, or more about how you guys are conducting business there at the Grand Rapids chamber in general. What would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect with you?

Rick Baker 35:56
Yeah, the best way to reach me is I is email, quite honestly, and it’s, it’s simple emails, is rick@grandrapids.org, okay, very simple than that.

Brandon Burton 36:07
Yeah, I like that. We’ll, we’ll get it in our show notes too, to make it easy, even easier for people, yeah, to reach out to you. But Rick, this has been great having you on the show. I appreciate you taking the time to visit with us and to share. You know these, these programs you guys are involved with that are making an impact in your community, and I wish you and your team Best of luck as chamber of the year.

Rick Baker 36:28
Thank you so much. Brandon, appreciate you.

Brandon Burton 36:33
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2025 Chamber of the Year Finalist-Ocala Metro CEP with Tamara Fleischhaker

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

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2025 ACCE chamber of the year finalists series. And for today’s episode, we’re thrilled to welcome Tamara Fleischhaker . Tamara is a powerhouse in public policy, community development and business advocacy. She currently serves as the interim president and CEO, as well as the chief experience officer of the Ocala Metro Chamber and Economic Partnership, or the CEP. With nearly two decades of leadership at the CEP, Tamara has played a pivotal role in merging organizations, launching innovative programs like business incubators and award winning communication strategies, and steering grass root political victories that have shaped the region’s future. Tamara’s roots in business run deep, from helping out in her family’s screen printing company in high school to work in in corporate marketing at Fortune 100 company to becoming one of Florida’s most respected chamber professionals. She is a certified chamber executive, a Florida certified chamber professional, and an IOM program graduate, recognized as a 2016 professional of the Year by the Florida Association of chamber professionals. Tamara recently chaired that same board in 2022 to 2023 outside of work, Tamara is a passionate community advocate, serving on multiple nonprofit boards. She’s also a die hard hockey fan who splits her loyalty between the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Toronto Maple leaves, and she loves exploring every corner of Florida but Tamara, I’m excited to have you on the podcast today. First, congratulations to you and your team for being selected as chamber of the year finalists. It’s quite an accomplishment, but thank you. Yeah. I wanted to give you a chance to say hello to all the listeners out there, but also to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Tamara Fleischhaker 3:04
All right. Well, wonderful. So thank you so much for this opportunity. We have such a tremendous team here, so I’m really grateful that that all of their work to get us to this finalist position. It’s truly an honor you. So you’ve already talked about my hockey background. You know, I love water, whether it’s the ocean or frozen ponds, if you will. And I probably, another interesting fact is I also love hot air ballooning. I had the opportunity to get involved in that when I was a teenager, and because I’ve been in a festival life, kind of a festival volunteer, for most of my life, and had the opportunity to crew for hot air balloons. And also, you know, go up in a few and that has always been a lot of fun. It’s something I don’t get much time to do now, in in the current role that I have, but it’s, it’s still a passion for me

Brandon Burton 3:51
that is really cool. I’ve never been up in a hot air balloon. I don’t know if I could, I don’t know if I could do it. I don’t know. I’ve seen videos of people that go up and they do skydiving from them, where they get no thank you. I don’t need to. I can’t do that for sure. I’m out myself. Yeah, very cool. Well, tell us a little bit about the CEP to kind of set the stage for our conversation. Let us know the size, the organization, staff, scope of work you guys are involved with budget just to kind of prepare us for the topics we cover.

Tamara Fleischhaker 4:23
Sure. So we our organization was formed about 13 years ago through a merger of both the Chamber of Commerce and the Economic Development Corporation in the Ocala Metro, and I’ve been with the organization through that merger. So it’s really been an exciting 12 years for us. When it was first formed, we were all coming out of a pretty tough, historic downturn of the economy, and we certainly had our issues in our community. So the organization was really formed with the goal in mind to be exactly what this community needed. I know people have. Merged and unmerged organizations, yeah, over time. And, you know, they always say, Well, what did you do? And I said, You know what the key to this is find out what your community needs. And that is what we did. And we’ve certainly seen the success with doing that. You know, Florida has seen tremendous growth. We ourselves were listed this year as the fastest, fastest growing Metro in the country, with a 4% growth rate year over year, which was a little bit of a okay, that explains why it feels like this in our community. And then, which is, of course, why we’ve also been focused on infrastructure. We’ll get to that in a little bit. But so this organization has, has really focused on, how do we grow jobs from the ground up? So entrepreneurship, we run two incubator facilities within our team. We also, of course, work on Business Retention and Expansion and business attraction in the traditional lanes of economic development. But outside of that, we are a full service, chamber functioning organization as well. And so we have on, you know, all of our full team that you would expect as a part of that we do all of the networking events and educational events, run a adult and a youth leadership program through the organization. So we have all of what you would traditionally expect within both sides of organizations. We just get to do it all with a really integrated team. We have about 30 staff members that host all of that because, additionally we we have a foundation within our structure. We have a a CDFI that we are working on within that organization. We also run a market space, which during covid, is something that really became a piece for us, that we have a facility, that it’s undercover, but yet outdoors, and we run a Saturday market out of there, and we rent it out to the community for different events, and, you know, festival pieces that they might do as well. So gives us another stream of income there, but it also adds a little bit more staff to the team. So again, we that’s our size of staff, we have about 1300 partners. We call our members partners because they are partners in the work that we do to support the business community. So that is how we look at our organization. So right around 1300 partners, I’m not sure if there’s something I missed in there, but I’m sure that if there’s another key point, you’ll let me know.

Brandon Burton 7:20
Yeah, no, I think you did a great job covering kind of that scope that you guys are involved with. I guess one of the aspects, budget wise, what do you guys look at? Budget wise? Yeah,

Tamara Fleischhaker 7:32
so for budget, we run about 4.4 million across our six entities,

Brandon Burton 7:37
okay, and I think that’s important, just for those listening to be able to try to scale, you know, the different programs and Exactly,

Tamara Fleischhaker 7:43
yeah, because they’re also wondering, how do you have 30 staff members? That’s

Brandon Burton 7:47
part of it, right? Absolutely so. And from what I remember before and having Kevin Sheilley on the podcast a couple of times, you guys are heavy in the equine industry as well. We

Tamara Fleischhaker 7:59
are. So yeah, we are blessed to be the horse capital of the world, and that is, I know a lot of people ask the question, Well, what about some other particular areas across the country? And we absolutely agree that Lexington is the thoroughbred capital. Ours is because we represent 73 different breeds, and we have one horse to every four people in our community. So we have more horses than any other place in the country, and that is part of the USDA registration of information. So yep, our our groups here have trademarked that name, and we love that. I I still believe we are the only chamber I know. We’re the only chamber in the country right now that has an equine initiative, which we absolutely love, because that is a huge part of our tourism trade here, and we absolutely enjoy having that be a part of our organization. And yes, so that is under what we call our traditional chamber side operations. But there is also economic opportunity in that as well, because we have a lot of companies that have created equine products in the community to meet the needs of what that horse community looks like.

Brandon Burton 9:04
Yeah, I think that’s a great example of going back to what you had said about creating the organization to what your community needs, right? You guys leaned heavy into that. So that’s awesome, absolutely. Well, on these chamber of the year finalist episodes, I like to spend most of our time really diving into the two program synopsis that were submitted on your chamber of the year application. So we’ll take a quick break, and when we come back, we’ll dive in deep on both of those and learn more about what you guys submitted.

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Brandon Burton 12:17
All right. Tamara, we are back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’ll dive into the two program synopsis that were submitted on your chamber of the year application. I know one of them has to do with the sales sales tax referendum, sales tax referendum. If I could speak right, why don’t you tell us what that’s about, the history of that and how it came to be. You know, at the front of mind right now for you guys to approach,

Tamara Fleischhaker 12:42
sure, absolutely so for us, this was actually our third referendum that we ran on a sales surtax for infrastructure and first responders. We started back in 2015 again, recognizing that our community was growing so rapidly that even if we looked at impact fees and our traditional methodologies of you know you’re getting your property tax, we wanted to maintain a balance in all of that, because as a growing community, to meet the needs. So we recognize that the best thing we could do is run a sales tax because then it’s not just our community that pays for it, it’s all those visitors that come to us. So we started that first process. Ran it for four years, and it was successful. We won. Then what we found out is that there continued to be some pressure from the legislature about how taxes were run. They were setting some standards about when in the year cycle you could do it and for how many years you might be able to so we did another four year and was very successful. That led us to looking at this tremendous growth that we’ve already spoken of, how fast we were growing. We want to be able to keep up with that infrastructure and make sure that the services that our community enjoys are still able to be found in the community as you’re moving here, or for someone who’s been here their whole life, the other piece of that is our schools are struggling, because often what they find is they get some unfunded mandates that come along to them, and you have that tremendous growth, they’ve got more students, and they’re outpacing the facilities that we’ve had. So we also realized that we had kind of a dual need for what was going to happen in the next 10 to 15 years. So we thought, you know, when you buy a house, you don’t plan for just four years of how much you’re going to pay for a mortgage, you’re planning 20 years, right? 20 years or more. So we said, let’s think about this in terms of how roads are being built in the community, how the transportation plans are being written. And we decided to tackle it for a 20 year penny sales tax for transportation infrastructure. And then we decided to add a half penny for 10 years dedicated to school facilities. So that might mean existing, upgrading existing facilities and or building new schools, which is all happening as a part of that plan. One of the things. That has made this so successful for us is when we first went to the community with it, we were very transparent with it. The city and county joined in on this process, and every dollar that they’re spent, they’ve created a budget for it in advance. It goes through the city’s budget process every year. It goes through the counties, and every time they spend money, they show the money. So the county has a dedicated website, and each of them has it in their budget, what they’re spending from those committed pennies that they’re getting and how they’re using it, whether it’s 10 fire trucks and, you know, new radios for something, or whether it is improvements to our jail facility and we built, you know, 17 miles of roadway or resurface, 12 miles. It literally gets put down to every penny that they spend and how they’re doing that. And then each year in the budget cycle, they can, you know, re look at events that are going on in the community, or they can look at what their use is, or a special needs. Do we, you know, are we building out a new section of our community? Maybe need a new fire station. So you know, that can be adjusted each year as a part of the budget process, but that’s how we went about, kind of taking the lead in this and recognizing that we needed to bring a community together. The greatest part of this is how we were able to mobilize so many different groups together on this. We brought together our realtor Association, road builders. We brought together all of our Of course, you know, we’ve got our public and private on both sides of that, but the business community really came together for this, and we raised over $250,000 to help run commercials and take kind of a new digital turn on that. But we also had some of these organizations going ahead and sending email blasts or doing social media campaigns. We even went to to the unions for the school board and also to our first responders, and they shared out this information because it helps them. They’re getting new equipment. They’re getting well taken care of. It doesn’t come out of general funds. So they still get to, you know, maintain the salaries, and we still get they still get to have improvements there. Because the worst thing a community can do it would be to go ahead and train people and then not be able to pay those first responders and have them go to someone else’s community. So we put all of these pieces together. We were so excited that the community really came together behind this. It really was one of those things where, you know, you get that broad collaboration as a part of what we’re doing, and with that, we’re actually ending up building two elementary schools, adding a new wing to a middle school, and building a new high school. All in those projects are already in process for the next five years, and so there are some other improvements that will happen out of that for the schools, but it really is a big piece of how do we make sure that local governments have the flexibility that they need, that they can stay sustainable and that they have long term funding sources for the growing needs of our community, where they don’t have to put that tax burden just on the property tax zone, you know, for those who would pay property tax for owners. So that was a really big piece for us. Really exciting. It was the first time we’d ever done true digital media, basically being on, you know, Amazon Prime, being on Hulu. It was a whole new venture for us to take that large of a piece. But we, you know, we also did a lot of conversations to business groups, anyone that wanted us to talk about it. We come see them. We went out to several communities, you know, we’ve got larger housing communities in the in the in our metro, and went out talk to them, gave them the whole, you know, here’s what it is. We’re just laid out the facts. And it was really incredible to see how they all really supported that and came behind it. We passed it in every single district, every voting district, which I think is, you know, the bigger piece of this, that kind of, you know, a lot of people told us it’s going to be close. You’re going to be you might get one passed, you probably won’t get both, and it’ll probably be a pretty close vote. Well, I’ll take 63% of the vote for the sales tax renewal and 59% for the schools tax so when I look at those numbers, I think that that’s that’s a pretty good thing, saying our community agreed that we need to take care of our schools, and that we need to have our students in safe classrooms and having all the technology that they need for the future, and also that we’re taking care of our first responders and that we have great roads to travel on in the Ocala Metro. So, you know, we’re pretty excited about how that all came together this last year.

Brandon Burton 19:38
Yeah, think that’s a huge help with the for example, the the transportation and first responders, sales tax, when every penny is being accounted for, and you can go back and say, Look, this is where it’s all being spent, that makes it a whole lot easier to pass the next time it absolutely does. My question, when it when it comes to the schools, is there certain things that that money is allowed to be allocated? To or is there like, for example, sometimes when a bond is passed, maybe it can’t pay teacher salaries, but it can build new infrastructure, new schools, campuses and stuff like that. Yeah. So, yeah,

Tamara Fleischhaker 20:12
yes, yeah. So the parameters for this, actually, it is all about capital outlay. So this was very specifically for new construction, for facility updates, so there is none of this being spent on salaries. But again, it helps to keep that out of the general fund. And because of the term, they were able to put Bonds out so they could build the schools now and pay those off as they collect that sales tax over the next, you know, few years. So yeah, it is very specifically because they had funding, and we’ve helped them find it for other programming. We actually passed a one mill renewal two years ago that helps them with our technical training skills and being able to have more in the arts sector of their schools. So we’ve been helping out in that lane and bringing people together for that for you know, this is more than this one election cycle, but yes, this particular sales tax is dedicated very specifically to the capital investments within the schools.

Brandon Burton 21:12
So my other question with this program is, with the capital that was raised to promote and do the digital marketing and everything that you guys did it? Did you have somebody in house that could kind of leverage that, or did you contract and go with an agency that could help put you in contact with prime and Hulu and, you know those examples you mentioned?

Tamara Fleischhaker 21:29
Yeah, this, this was the first time. So in the first couple of campaigns we we did a lot in house, social media, driven in those but this was well outside of our wheelhouse. So we absolutely did hire an agency. And I will tell you, it was an agency that was referred to us by a partner in the community. And again, you know, we had so much of our business community that said, you know, we’re absolutely behind you on this, and helped fund that investment. So yeah, we did a little bit of we supplied some B roll and some other video because we do have our own video studio in house, so we were able to work with them on that and help put together the scripting. And so that was kind of the fun part, that we were able to use some of what we’ve done in the community and our own video studio and supply that information to them. But yeah, we definitely hired this out, just to make sure you want to put the experts in a smart move. Yeah, yeah. And I think every year, we all realize as Chamber organizations, it gets harder and harder when you’re doing political things on social media and and those types of channels. There’s so many restrictions that are put in place that it’s always best to let the experts do that if you’re in a position to do it.

Brandon Burton 22:37
Yeah, absolutely. Well, let’s shift gears and change our focus on to the other program that you guys submitted on your application. If you’d like to introduce that program and tell us what it was all about.

Tamara Fleischhaker 22:49
Absolutely. So our other program is what we call the Ocala Metro Catalyst Fund. This is a community development finance institution which is regulated through the US Treasury Department, this was a new thing for us. We I guess I should step back and say, you know, we started an incubator program with the help of the county and city on the campus that we have here, because we are right across from City Hall, and within our campus area here, they had a building that used to be the original power plant for the city of Ocala, and so both of those entities helped us open up in that building. So it’s the power plant business incubator. So we started there with a real focus on entrepreneurship. And how do we help people to grow their own business? Right? It’s the greatest way that you can have control of your own career and your life is to be able to start your own business. And so we have been running that incubator since 2012 it has been incredibly successful, and this last year, we were able to open a second incubator location. But in the process of running these incubators, the biggest challenge I think we continue to recognize is that there’s an access to capital issue for entrepreneurs, and it can be even worse in some of our underserved communities. And we have three that we’ve really keep an eye on within our community, that those zip codes kind of tend to be the ones that really have struggled the most in our community, and have kind of been overlooked over the years. And so we have put programming from our incubators specifically into those communities. And what we recognized is traditional lenders don’t often help those in the underserved community, and they don’t have that way to do that. So what CDFIs do in a community is they help close that financial gap. They can spur economic growth and promote mobility where, you know, traditional lending falls short in that lane. So for us, you know, we did a lot of surveying, a lot of talking to people in the community. And you know, part of what happened is. It actually started in a post covid environment, right when we were looking at businesses that were receiving assistance through the Cares Act, and then we realized there continued to be this gap in critical funding in the state of Florida has made great inroads over the past couple of years, but we had already started into this process and recognize that for lower income zip codes. This is going to be an ongoing challenge with traditional lenders. So we started out a new 501, c3, and as you can imagine, in this being a federal program, there are a lot of regulations, a lot of processes to go through. So we did hire a consultant to help us start this process that got us on the on the road to this. And so, you know, we’ve now been able to offer some nano loans to businesses as a part of the process, and we’re already in the repayment process on that. And what we’re really looking forward to over the next few years is that we’re hoping to get our final certification in January. We’re fully on track with that. We’ve received a large grant from Treasury to make the next steps in this and working towards that certification. The other piece of it is our county government has also given us a grant that we’re using as a matching grant in the community. They gave us $75,000 to go out to the business community. And so we are currently raising matching grant funds through that so that we’ll be able to offer larger loans, where our next step is micro loans and those who would be anywhere from 2000 to 15,000 and then once we’re fully certified, and we can engage banks, then at that point as a part of the process, then we’re hoping to be able to go to those more traditional business loan sizes of somewhere between, you know, usually around $50,000 would be kind of the top end of those types of loans. But that gives businesses who are in their first five years of startup that working capital that they that they need. And again, we’re really targeting communities that would traditionally not be served by a traditional bank because of where they you know, those communities are, and because of their economic situation that they’re already in. So our goal is to try to make equity where we can in the community, and to try to balance that for everyone, so that there’s an equal opportunity. Because we do feel that entrepreneurship is the fastest way to to really create personal wealth and personal opportunity for you and your family.

Brandon Burton 27:27
Yeah, I love this idea. I’d love to see more chambers embrace this and be able to provide access to capital, funding to these, these businesses, you know, coming out of an incubator, these new businesses, I’m trying to get going. The biggest question that I have, so you addressed it, you know, how the funding, how this in, I think, in the the introduction, you had talked about your foundation. So this is how it’s within the foundation.

Tamara Fleischhaker 27:53
But this actually this, so this actually does run separately of our foundation. Oh, so yeah, just, yeah. Just to clarify our so our Foundation did help with initial startup funds. So you know, when we were trying to get those nano loans started, but we have, actually, this is its own separate 501, c3, organization now. So yeah, when we first started talking about it and how do we fund some of the initial pieces we were working on, we did use our foundation to help us with that, but at this point, it is a standalone organization, and so I think that’s what makes it a little more special as we’ve been able to move it forward. And I think that’s what makes it such an important program, is that it doesn’t rely on our foundation. Our foundation can still be dedicated to serving the mission of our overall organization, right where we talk about, you know that the foundation can magnify mission, and so that’s what we continue to work on. So this one is its own entity at this point,

Brandon Burton 28:48
awesome that. Thank you for that. Clarification. When it comes to the the Nano loans, the the soon to be micro loans that you you give out. How do you secure that? Like, what kind of is there collateral? Is there? How do you ensure that you get repayment and that it’s not just a gift?

Tamara Fleischhaker 29:06
Yes, no, yep. So, so we, you know, there is a whole comprehensive process, much like banks go through, right, looking at their financial situation, looking at the viability of that business, right? Because it’s partly the same process we use in an incubator is that business scalable. What, you know, what are the opportunities? And part of what the great part in doing this process is there’s a requirement for them to get this funding that they have to go through the technical training so they get the technical assistance that goes with it. So we’re working with these businesses. Our team over at our incubator is working with them every day to, you know, to check in and make sure that they’ve got all of the pieces of that ready. We actually, because we’ve had a great partnership with Kauffman Foundation through the incubator for several years. We have some of their programs, like the Fast Track Program, which is a great program that gets a business started on. Yeah, how do you even write a marketing plan? How do you write your business plan? And over the course of that, they’re writing all of those documents and really getting themselves on stable footing. Because the key to an incubator in any community is essentially, we say we help a business fail fast, right? If you’re going to make mistakes, do it in a safety net where you’ve got people around you that can help catch you and help get you back on track, because that’s the piece right. Businesses that are incubated, I am probably going to get the stats wrong, and those of your listeners will be like, that’s not the right stat, but I’m going to estimate that it’s about they’re 80% more successful in the first five years, whereas, you know, an average business without that kind of support network, you probably have about a, you know, 12% survival rate, and so we know that that’s already, you know, the piece to having a community that supports our entrepreneurs, and that’s a key piece, but having that opportunity for them to get that continued coaching that becomes a part of the process as well, because they don’t get their loan payments. If they don’t, you know, and have that technical assistance going on. And I think that’s the piece that makes this so special, and that’s a continuing piece, but that links it back into our incubator as we’re going forward now. The other thing that we did is we had an amazing event just recently, which was a matchmaker event, and this is where we bring in local banks. We had about 25 local banks, about 120 participants, and all of them come in and they sit down with those documents that they have, their business plans and their financial documents, and they talk to the banks about getting loans. And so the other piece is we’re teaching these businesses how to build up the what they need within their business that will help them in the future with regular, traditional loan programs. And that’s really the goal behind this, is to get them established, give them a credit history, because, more than anything, that’s what they’re missing. They don’t have a credit history, even if they had collateral. They’re a new business, right, right? It makes them risky. And so that’s that’s our goal, with all of this is really opening the door for them, for the future, for larger and other, you know, loan opportunities.

Brandon Burton 32:07
Yeah, that is fantastic. The whole point about helping these businesses fail fast, reminds me of Thomas Edison and a reporter asked him, you know, what do you think about all your failures? He’s like, I didn’t fail. I figured out 1000s of ways that a light bulb would not work, right? And that’s the whole idea. You fail fast so you can get to that solution.

Tamara Fleischhaker 32:25
Yeah, we actually have that quote on the wall in our incubator. We we went with a lot of those types of quotes as inspiration, because that’s it, right? And when you know so many people that you know, sometimes we talk about we have some serial entrepreneurs in our community too, and some of them are on their third or fourth company, because they just love that drive. Now that they’ve, you know, they’ve been so successful in their first business, they keep going on to the next. And I love seeing that.

Brandon Burton 32:48
Yeah, that’s awesome. But Tamara, as we begin to wrap things up, I wanted to ask for the listeners who are interested in taking their organization up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item would you suggest for them and trying to accomplish that goal.

Tamara Fleischhaker 33:03
So I think the first thing I would say is never think that you’re too small to try starting some of these programs. I think that’s that’s the biggest part is we say, well, we could never do what the Ocala CEP does, because we don’t have that kind of budget or that kind of staff. 13 years ago, there were five staff, and I can guarantee you, we had a small budget at the time. So I think the key to any of this is, what can you take away, what part of what we’re doing can you use, you know, if it’s, you know, from a sales tax standpoint, okay, take a look at your community. And is this something that you think with transparency and other things? Because I’ll share how we did it. I shared all the time, and I think that’s the great news about chambers, right? We talk about R and D all the time. I’m going to rip off and duplicate what somebody else is doing. And most of the things that we do truly are scalable. So even if there’s just a few of you, get a committee together, get, you know, get your board behind what you’re doing, and let them help lead the brigade for you. And what we’re doing with an incubator, you do not have to be in the situation we’re in. Get your community partners together. That’s what we do as Chamber organizations, right? We’re the catalyst. We’re the conveners. We bring people together. So get people behind you on this, whether that issue is housing, whether that is, you know, improvements in your communities, whether it’s entrepreneurship, there are so many lanes that you can bring people together, and that’s really what we do best. So I would say, don’t be afraid to try it. Just go for it. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 34:33
I love that response. I like asking everyone I have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Tamara Fleischhaker 34:45
So I think, you know, we talk about this all the time. We hear the news stories, and we see this kind of greater political divide, or so it seems. But I think what we’re finding more and more is as things seem a little more crazy in the environment. And around us, people look to their chamber. Businesses definitely look to us. And they say, Okay, we we’re asking you to lead, and I think we’re going to be called upon. We’re we’re already seeing it happening. And I’m sure chambers across the country are as well, that we’re being called upon to voice an opinion or be a part of more issues that are happening in our community, and of course, my only caution would be make sure that whatever you’re engaging in meets your mission, right that, because it’s so easy for us to have mission drift and stray away from that, but our voices matter so much in the community, and we’re going to continue to be called on so we all need to be thinking about that. What are we prepared to what is our process for engaging on issues, and what’s the right thing for our community, and how do we want to address that? As chambers,

Brandon Burton 35:47
yeah, I totally agree. But Tamara, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect or learn more about your approaches. There in Ocala. Where would you point them? What would be the best way for them to connect

Tamara Fleischhaker 36:04
with you? Well, the place that I will start them is our website. It is the OcalaCEP.com so Ocala is spelled o c, a, l, A, C, E, p.com, and you can see, we’ve got a team page there. We’re all you can find any one of us on that and make an outreach, and you’ll easily find me there. And the great news is, most of us are first name at Ocala, cep.com if you want to send an email. So again, I’m Tamara. It’s T, A, M, A, R, A, and so you can feel free to give me a call, you know, off of the website there, or you can give me an email and I’m happy to connect with you, or connect you with a member of my team who might be a better resource for you.

Brandon Burton 36:43
That’s very good, and we’ll make sure to have the website and our show notes to make it easy for people to find you guys and fantastic reach out and connect. But Tamara, this has been great having you on the show. Thank you for diving into these programs and telling us how you guys are making that secret sauce there in Ocala. But I wish you and your team Best of luck as chamber of the year.

Tamara Fleischhaker 37:05
Thank you so much. Brandon. Really appreciate the opportunity to talk to your listeners.

Brandon Burton 37:11
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2025 Chamber of the Year Finalist-Greater Fort Wayne Inc. with John Urbahns

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

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2025 ACCE chamber of the year finalist series. And our guest for this episode is John or bonds. John is the CEO of Greater Fort Wayne Inc, and of course, he’s representing a Greater Fort Wayne Inc as a chamber of the year finalist. But he joined the organization in 2014 and at the time, was serving as executive vice president economic development, before taking on the CEO role in 2019 under his leadership, Greater Fort Wayne Inc has assisted with over 200 business expansions and relocations, resulting in more than 13,500 new jobs and $600 million in new payroll. Previously, John was the Director of Community Development for the City of Fort Wayne, managing strategic planning, redevelopment and economic development initiatives. John has led key community projects such as the landing electric works and the Bradley hotel, while also engaging with residents and leaders to shape Allen County’s future. He holds a degree in urban planning and environmental design from Ball State University, and is an AICP certified urban planner, John, I want to welcome you back to chamber chat podcast. Congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a chamber of the year finalists. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the chamber champions, and if you would share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

John Urbahns 2:41
Hello, Brandon, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be back. Love talking about our team. Our team is excited about this opportunity. We think we’ve done a great job in transforming our community, and really all of northeast Indiana, so excited about it. You know, I’m a I’m just a proud Hoosier. I’m a proud father of three great kids here that are all making choices to stay in our community at the end of the day. That’s that’s the biggest job in the world that I have, is making sure that every kid has the opportunity to have a great opportunity in Fort Wayne, in Allen County, and just continue to thrive. So excited to be here. That’s

Brandon Burton 3:22
right. You’re you’re living the work that you do, right, keeping your kids into the community. That’s great. That’s great. Well, tell us a little bit about Greater Fort Wayne Inc, to kind of set the perspective for us as we start our discussion today. Give us an idea of the size staff, scope of work. You guys are involved with budget, that sort of things Greater

John Urbahns 3:42
Fort Wayne ink, you know, a lot of people think, Oh, you’ve been around forever. I joined the organization in 2014 January, 2014 when we formed the organization, Oh, right. We merged our chamber of commerce, which was 100 years old, our Economic Development Alliance, which was a public private partnership doing economic development, which was about 20 years old, and then our leadership Fort Wayne program, which is at the time, was about little over 30 years old, and merged those together, the business community really said, we need to pull these assets together to do economic development, to do chamber activities, to do leadership programming, so that we can take on bigger and bolder projects in the community. So we’re about 1111, and a half years old as an organization, but you know, really serving as the economic development entity and the chamber for all of Allen County. So not just Fort Wayne, but New Haven Hunter town, some of the smaller communities, 660 square miles, is our is our jurisdiction, but we work very closely with those regional counties in northeast Indiana.

Brandon Burton 4:46
All right, very good. But how many Chamber members and staff? Yeah,

John Urbahns 4:51
so we have, we have 14. We just passed the 1400 mark on membership in the community. We’ve got 20 staff members. But. Budget of about $3.4 million that that is made up of, you know, membership revenue, dues, a non dues revenue, just lot of great things going on. A lot of great support from our community. In what we’re doing as a community, we’re seeing a lot of growth, which is what you want to see as a chambers and an economic development agency, and really feel that the work we’re doing is helping drive that.

Brandon Burton 5:23
Yeah, very cool. Well, on these chamber of the year finalist episodes, I like to spend the majority of our time really diving into the two programs that were submitted on your chamber of the year application. So we’ll take a quick break, and when we get back, we’ll dive in deep on those two programs.

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Brandon Burton 8:28
All right, John, we’re back, as I mentioned before the break, we’re we’re diving in on the two programs from your your chamber of the year application. I know one of them has, you know, obviously, a focus on economic development and another one on talent attraction. Do you have a preference on which one you’d like to cover first?

John Urbahns 8:47
I’m good with either one. You know, our role, our mission, is about building nationally recognized economy, but our Why is really about people and capital. So we always talk to people about it. It’s about people setting the environment where people want to be, where people want to move to, and where capital wants to be deployed, whether that’s locally, nationally or internationally. So both these programs tie very, very much into our why on the people and capital side. So people are probably the most important. So let’s just jump in on the people side.

Brandon Burton 9:17
All right, so let’s do that so your your onboard program, tell us what that’s about. And kind of, I always like to know what the need was, it was addressed, and how you guys went about answering

John Urbahns 9:27
that need. Yeah. So one of the one of the areas that we started working was onboard Fort Wayne. We’ve seen a lot of growth in our community. We We had a lot of years of, kind of dying, the slow death, of negative domestic migration and population decrease with some of the work that we’ve done to drive investment in the community, we’ve now seen eight straight years of positive domestic migration. If you go back 1990 when they started tracking this every year was negative until eight years ago, and that’s because we chose to invest in ourselves. Started to make progress in that environment, and as we started to see that increased domestic migration, we started seeing a lot of influx from people from throughout the nation coming in to Fort Wayne and Allen County. How are we going to welcome them? How are we going to really come alongside them and help them get connected within the community? So we created the onboard program about five years ago, and have slowly built out different segments of it. And over the last couple of years, we built, we built in the intern experience and best in class, which are two of the two of the pieces that we submitted for the chamber of the year application. So the intern experience, really diving in with interns and companies. They’re going to come here to work and hopefully have a great experience at their company. How do they fall in love with the community? And that’s what we stepped in to help do. So each summer, we do between five and one year nine, nine weeks straight of just social activities for the interns, to get them connected to each other, to get them connected to the community. One of the keys is we, you know, we survey them early on. You know, what’s the chances of you seeing yourself living in Fort Wayne post graduation in both years, it’s been a little right around 60% of the kids see themselves living here. And these are kids that are coming from all over the US, right? We part of the survey. We look at where they coming from one year, 25 states. One year, 23 states, multiple countries, of kids coming in from across the US to do internships here. So these college interns? Is that college intern? Yep. So if only 60% can see themselves, living here, that’s a challenge for us. By the end of the summer, both years, it’s increased to well over 80% of the kids we when we do the post program survey, 80% over 80% say they could see themselves living in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And there’s a lot, and we ask them why we you know, it comes down to cost of living, opportunities, connectedness, not just within the in Fort Wayne, but to outline, you know, larger metros. So we feel the program has been very successful. Our companies feel great about it. It lets them focus on the day to day, you know, like, let’s make sure they have a great work environment that they like our company, but we help them fall in love with the community. And maybe there’s some connections that are made while they’re here over the summer, and they and they fall in love in general, and have those strong connections as well. So it’s it’s creating that connection to the community. We parlayed that last year into the best in class program and said, All right, we’re getting great results from these college interns, but how do we get to kids before they go off to college? How do we build that pipeline? Just like a company builds a pipeline, we need to build a pipeline. So last year, we worked with all 17 high schools in Allen County and really sat down with your principals, your guidance counselors, and said, Give us your top kids, your 10 to 15 kids, not necessarily one through 10, one through 15 in the grades, but who are the leaders? Who are the kids that are going to go off and maybe never come back? And we pulled them together and said, give them to us for a night. So we had about 250 kids come together last year, and we had this best in class event where we talked about what’s going to happen over the next four years in our community, right? How is it going to change? We had some young entrepreneurs come in and talk to them about how they’ve chosen to make their best life here in Fort Wayne and Allen County. We talked about the business environment, right? So many kids, they don’t. They know about what’s going on the community, but they don’t know about industry. So we highlighted the key industry sectors and the great job opportunities that they can have here in the community. And then at the end, we wrapped it up with a cost of living index, right? We had, we had kids at tables, and we gave every kid a different at the table, a different city, and we started to help them understand, or they, I guess they under they figured out themselves. Hey, if I move off to some of these bigger cities, am I going to be able to afford to live the way I would like to live? Can I have? Can I own a car? Can I own a home? How much am I going to be able to go out? How many times can I go to Starbucks or the local coffee shop? And they started to understand Fort Wayne, Indiana was the best place for them to grow up. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 14:34
my son is our oldest. He graduated high school last year, so his eyes are being opened right now as he’s looking at cost of living, and what a call to reality. You’ve got these 250 of the greatest leaders in your area, you know, coming out of high school. Then to be able to give them this, this real life metric of this is one of just one of the real positive. Of reasons why you’d want to choose our community to stay, you know,

John Urbahns 15:04
yes. So you always wonder, did I make an impression? What? What’s the results of this? Right? We wanted these kids to not just know themselves, but ultimately go off to college and be our sales people while they’re out at, you know, universities throughout the Midwest, throughout the US, we had calls the next day from parents and said, I don’t know exactly what you said to my kids last night, but they were leaving. They were leaving after high school. They were going off to a couple of cases, Indiana University, Purdue University, pick your new mission. They were going there, and they were never coming back, and after last night, they said they want to come back. And that, to me, says we made a difference. That’s really cool, right? We’re driving change. We’re changing the mindset of the young folks about the community, and they’re starting to see the great opportunities that they can have. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 15:59
and so going backwards a little bit with the intern program, I think that’s a missed opportunity that so many chambers and communities have where interns come in and so much of the focus is on, you know, building the the work experience, and connecting with the company and and we miss that opportunity to connect them with the community and To get them to get them to fall in love with the community, you

John Urbahns 16:23
have to engage them. You have to get them to fall in love. You know, we’ve we’ve done a lot of work in our community about reinventing, reinvesting ourselves, building up our downtown. We do a business survey. Every five years, we hire a polling firm. It’s not just a survey we do. We are a polling firm. We do a statistical analysis of it, and 95% of the businesses believe we’re on the right track with where we’re headed. The number one issue in the community that they think affecting talent, attraction, retention, and these are companies across the community, is downtown and riverfront revitalization. So we know we’re on the right track, that we’re hitting the right points. Now we need to get those kids that out and enjoy those things and see those things while they’re here. So feel really good about it.

Brandon Burton 17:13
That’s great. Well, let’s shift gears to the big economic development program, and the I’ll say economic development. Win that. You guys are going through it at the moment. Tell us about that. Yeah,

John Urbahns 17:28
the, you know, I mentioned people in capital. The other side of our business is the capital side, right? Economic development. How are we creating the environment to attract capital into our market and get locals to invest as well. But last year was was a big year for us. We had $3.66 billion in building permits in Allen County. Put that in perspective, if you go back to 2012 so about 13 years ago, we were averaging about $500 million of building permits a year. So we’ve seen dramatic growth in that we hit a billion in 2017 and we haven’t looked back from that. So capital is a big piece for us. The other thing we had looked at through our economic development strategy was land assembly, and how do we make sure that we have opportunities for companies to grow? We saw the need for land in our community. We had an opportunity with a project that came to us from our electrical provider and said, Hey, we’ve got a company that’s that’s looking at our market. We’ve done a lot of great things to improve our water supply and our access to water and on the electric side as well. So ultimately, we landed a $2 billion Google data center, right? It’s their largest AI data center in the world that’s being built here in Fort Wayne, and we had a challenge to figure out how to get 900 acres of land for that development. Ultimately, this could end up being a 10 plus billion dollar investment as the multiple phases grow out in our community. And these are, these are tech jobs in our most depressed area of the community, right? So we can come back to that, but there’s gonna be a lot of great spin off effects from this that we’re gonna be able to utilize. But we’ve talked a lot as a chamber world about chamber foundations over the last several years. Do you have a chamber if you don’t have a chamber foundation? When you’re asked that question at ACC, I feel like everybody’s like, Well, why don’t you have one yet? You need to look at one. So we have one. We’ve been, you know, using it in different ways. But one of the things we had to respond to this, this about a year and a half ago, when this project started, was we had a partner that was going to work on land assembly, and it wasn’t going well with the company, and the company came to us and said, Hey, can you help us acquire the property? And we said, Yes, we’re going to do that. We’re going to, let’s, let’s figure out how to do that. So we utilized some funding in our chamber foundation to go out and acquire a. The 900 acres of property so that we could move it forward. We acquired that 900 acres of property in under 90 days. Wow, which is amazing as a community, and we couldn’t have done it if we didn’t have the chamber foundation infrastructure in place to go and do that. I think the other thing you have to look at from you know, you think about all the horizon points. You think about catalytic leadership and pulling people together. This property was located not just in the city of Fort Wayne. It was also in the city of New Haven, and it was an unincorporated Allen County. We took the role as a developer to go acquire that property. But then also, you know, petition for the vacation of a county road, we had to get the city of New Haven to dis annex about 60 acres of the site that was in one community, so that the city of Fort Wayne could annex it and annex the rest of the property and have that in their tax base. Now, you go to a mayor and tell him, I need you to dis annex 60 acres so that your neighbor can take it. Yeah, right, that that’s a tough conversation. But he jumped right in and said, Hey, let’s figure out how to do it, because this is a win for our community. It’s a huge win. Yeah? Mindset, right? If you go back 510, years ago, this ends up in a lawsuit, and frankly, the project doesn’t happen, but we had that buy in, and it’s because we’ve got the trusted relationships with all the different partners to pull it together so that it was a win win for each of the communities, because he knows his community is going to grow because of this right he’s right next to it. He’s going to see a lot of great growth, even if the even if that project is not directly within his political jurisdiction, right? Companies don’t care about political lines. They care about getting projects done. We used our foundation, we acted in a way, to speed a business to get this win for the entire community,

Brandon Burton 22:01
yeah. I mean, Moses split the Red Sea. I mean, you guys worked on getting a city into D annex, part of the land. I mean, it’s a miracle, as far as I’m concerned, but being able to be that convener, so like you said, be that trust. You know, have that trust in the community. Be that convener to really lead a project that’s going to benefit all of the surrounding communities as well. It’s, I mean, that’s the perfect position and role that a chamber should be playing. And then you’ve got the added benefit of being able to access your your chamber Foundation to help, you know, get the ball over the line, so to speak. Great testimony on being conveners and having a chamber foundation to see a big project come together that’s super exciting.

John Urbahns 22:48
And this is going to have, you know, I mentioned that, I said I’d come back to it. You know, this isn’t, you know, part of the community that has seen the most disinvestment or the lack of investment over several decades. We now in that, in that part of the community, have our first market rate subdivision being built for the first time in 40 years. Wow, market rate subdivision being built with the with the with the project, and the TIF district and the city being able to work to reinvest dollars within that community, to look at neighborhood commercial corridor projects, and we’re looking at other industrial properties that need to be repurposed in that area. This project now gives us the opportunity to really dive in and make some really big, transformational change in that part of the community. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 23:36
that’s awesome. So just a side note or comment on the chamber foundation. For those who don’t have a foundation, may be curious, how do you how do you guys fund your foundation? How did that? How did the funds become available to be able to fund a project like this? Yeah, we,

John Urbahns 23:56
you know, our our foundation, our c3 organization, is all of our fee for service agreements with city, Fort Wayne, City, New Haven, the Airport Authority, the county commissioners, they flow through that as well. But then we’ve used that to assemble dollars. The dollars we used for this project date back 25 years when the business community raised funds to help the city finalize an industrial park, and as part of that, those business funds that went into it as land sold, came back to us, into that entity or that foundation, to reinvest and basically evergreen, so that we could continue to do similar investments about eight years ago, we use that funds, those funds to help the city acquire another 145 acres and turned around and sold that to a large, large facility here in town. Again, we got the money back, and then we used it in this case. And then. Um, when this project closed, the funds came back into that. So those, those funds are recycling and coming back to us to now. Now we’re looking at new opportunities. How are we going to invest that to again position the community for growth from an economic development perspective? So those rate, those funds were initially raised as from the private sector. There’s other funds that you know because of this project, we were able to get several people that were involved in the project to provide some additional funds to it so help grow it because of the success of that project. So we’re just trying to continue to grow it and make sure that we can leverage it multiple times, right? It didn’t, it didn’t help that project, not just that project back in 1999 it helped us with multiple projects along the way, and it’s going to help us continue to move things forward. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 25:56
it’s a great framework of how to utilize a foundation. And for those who are thinking about it, it’s a great exposure to one

John Urbahns 26:05
way we used it. I know that others use it a lot of different ways. We can all learn from each other. I think that’s the key that I like about ACC, that I like about this process. We all learn from each other. We’re all doing great things. We just might be doing different things. Absolutely, we

Brandon Burton 26:21
all have different communities. So John, for those listening who are wanting to take their chamber to the next level working towards that goal, what kind of tip or action item might you leave with them towards trying to accomplish that? I

John Urbahns 26:37
think one of the things that that I would tell all of my my peers, you know, those in this world, and I’ve learned this, you know, again, very recently, that we have to be we’re that we’re the future of the community. We’re looking out ahead. Make sure you’re having those conversations with your key businesses about the future, right? So often, we all get kind of bogged down in the day to day making sure that projects are moving forward, programs are moving forward. We could spend our entire day focused on the here and now and making sure that goes smooth. But we need to make sure that we’re having the conversations about the future, right we are. We are the future of our community. We’re going to drive that. We’re going to be the catalytic leader. We’re going to be the futurist. Make sure that you’re bringing your business, your key business leaders and government leaders along with you. In that regard, don’t lose sight of the future. Make sure that you have those conversations. Is what I would leave with everybody. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 27:39
and said, Don’t lose sight of the future. I always like asking that question, too, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

John Urbahns 27:48
Yeah, you know, I can only speak from for my chamber, but we are. I’ve seen the change in this community. Yeah, I came here almost 30 years ago, and it wasn’t a community that I moved to to spend a career. It was a community I moved to for a job out of college, and we started to make change, and chambers need to be key in that role. If you’re not, if you’re not affecting change in your community, you’re not doing it justice, and you’re not doing yourself justice. So the future, the future of chambers, is bright, but we have to make it bright.

Brandon Burton 28:26
Yeah, I like that. Need to be affecting change in your

John Urbahns 28:30
community. We, we often say, we, we need to, we need to make the change happen, and not let the change happen to us. Yeah, so many times that happens.

Brandon Burton 28:41
And you know, when it comes to change, a lot of people fear it, because so often the change does happen to us, but if you’re being forward thinking and driving the change, you’ve got a lot more you know, direction on what the future looks like when you’re driving it instead of being acted upon. So yeah, great point. Well, John, for those listening who might want to reach out and connect with you about either these programs or how you guys are doing things there. Greater, Fort Wayne Inc, where would you point them? What would be the best way for them to reach out and connect?

John Urbahns 29:12
I’d point them to our website. GreaterFortWayneInc.com, just just, you know, Google, us make that your That’s right, your browser choice, if you would please. But Greater Fort Wayne inc.com, all of our contact information is there. We are happy to have conversations about any of the programs we’re doing, any of the projects we’re here to help each other, and we definitely, we definitely subscribe to that. You know, I talked about, we talked about the Google project. We’ve coached probably now seven or eight other communities on how to handle these big projects and pull them off some of my peers that are probably listening here, we’ve had some conversations, and it’s been very valuable to them, and it’s valuable to us when we can go and talk about others. So. Go to the website. I will tell you that we are literally in the middle of a of a complete over overhaul of our website. So what you see today is what, not what you will see at the end of July or the first of August, but go to our website. Reach out to us and income back. Come see us.

Brandon Burton 30:19
Yeah, very good. And if you have trouble finding it, go to Google.

John Urbahns 30:24
Go to Google. It’s gonna be easy. I love the plug.

Brandon Burton 30:26
Well, John, this has been great having you back on Chamber Chat Podcast. I appreciate you spending time with us. I wish you and your team best of luck with chamber of the year. And you know, keep making those big swings and big movements in your community. You guys are doing awesome.

John Urbahns 30:40
Thank you. I appreciate it. Brandon.

Brandon Burton 30:43
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2025 Chamber of the Year Finalist-Sarasota Chamber with Heather Kasten

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

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2025 ACCE chamber of the year finalist series. And our guest for this episode is Heather Kasten. Heather is the president and CEO of the Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce in Florida, with more than 14 years of experience in the Sarasota region, Heather previously served as a President CEO of the Lakewood Ranch Business Alliance. She has a diverse background, having worked for Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals and six flag theme parks in various regional management roles. Heather is deeply engaged in the community, serving on the board of career source, Suncoast United Way Suncoast and the Education Foundation of Sarasota County. She is also active in several local advisory councils, including those for the USF Muma College of Business and the 26th West Entrepreneurship Center. Heather holds an MBA from Webster University and a business administration degree from the University of Iowa. Outside of her professional duties, she enjoys reading, boating, traveling and spending time with her family, but Heather, it’s great to have you back on chamber chat podcast. Welcome and congratulations for being selected. For those who may be familiar, they were chamber the year finalists in 2024 so this is two years in a row being selected as a finalist. So huge congratulations to you and your team. But wanted to give you a chance to say hello and to share something interesting about yourself so everyone listening can get to know you a little better.

Heather Kasten 2:42
Yeah, well, Brandon, thank you so much. It’s we’re so grateful to you for hosting this podcast, which is so informative. I really enjoy listening, and we are truly excited. Our team and board of directors are over the moon about us being a finalist again for ACCE, the Metro Chamber division this year. So we’re excited to go to Philly. We’ve got a good, good sized group of us traveling out there to attend the conference and the convention, and hopefully you’re going to bring something, bring that big trophy home. We’ll see that.

Brandon Burton 3:19
Yeah, yeah, there’s some. There’s something to be said about coming in numbers to the conference. I remember a few years ago in the Conway, Arkansas chamber one, and they had, like, I want to say, like, two full tables full, just packed full of people from Conway. And it was, it was pretty cool. So I’m glad you’re bringing a great representation. That’s awesome.

Heather Kasten 3:41
Yeah. And you know, as far as something unique about me, I feel like I’m, you know, a cat with nine lives in that I really have worked in many different industries, from theme parks, which we talked about last year, some of the funny duties work as a regional sales manager for six likes theme parks, and then in the pharmaceutical realm, through Lily and women’s health and the neuroscience division, and then landing in chamber work. And have been doing this, this work, for about 16 years now. And absolutely love it. Love just being able to serve and support the businesses in our community, which, let’s face it, they’re the engine that power any local economy, or the the local businesses,

Brandon Burton 4:26
absolutely. Well, give us some perspective with the greater Sarasota chamber. You mentioned being more regional, but give us an idea of size, staff, scope of work. You guys are involved with budget. That’ll kind of set the stage as we get into the programs that we talk about today.

Heather Kasten 4:43
Sure, we are 104 year old organization here in Sarasota, Florida. We work with a little over 1500 regional businesses throughout Sarasota and Manatee counties that represent. About 60,000 employees throughout the region. Our team here, I always like to say we’re a small but mighty team of 15 individuals who are just a committed, dedicated, passionate group of people who show up here every day working to support our local businesses. We have a very active Foundation, as well as as the chamber work that we do, and I know we’re going to get into some of those programs later. Those programs are truly funded through our foundation, very

Brandon Burton 5:35
cool. So I’m hopefully, as we go through the conversation today, we can pull more on the foundation. And I know there’s a lot of chambers out there that are trying to learn more about foundations, if they don’t already have one, seeing how they can deploy a foundation, how it can really be beneficial in their community. And so hopefully your experience will will be able to tap into that as we dive in today. So with these chamber of the year finalist episodes. I love to spend the majority of the time talking about the two programs that were submitted on your chamber of the year application. So when we get back from our quick break, we’ll dive into those programs and learn more about what it is you guys submitted on your application this year.

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Brandon Burton 9:02
All right, Heather, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re diving into the two programs from your chamber of the year application. I understand one of the programs is around career and workforce development. Do you like to tell us what that is and dive into what the I always like to know what the origins are and how it’s evolved to what it is today.

Heather Kasten 9:23
Yeah. So the exciting thing Career Edge is our workforce and talent initiative that has been around for coming up on 14 years. And this was really formed 14 years ago to address some, some tremendous gaps in our workforce, our local workforce. I always like to say career, just like a three legged stool. It takes funders to be able to fund the work that we do. It takes educational partners and providers to train and then it takes the participant, the individual, who is actually willing to go through the program and come out the other end. End the what we submitted this year for ACCE was just the work and the results of Career Edge. Every year we have a third party evaluator come in and really do a deep dive into, you know, the wage increases that individuals experienced. They validate all of the data that we that we provide. And so it’s not the Sarasota chamber beating our chests saying, Oh, look at the work we’ve done. This is, again, an independent evaluator looking at this work. Last year, we deployed over $330,000 in workforce grants and training and upskilling grants, and we train just shy of 500 local individuals. So, you know the So, what of that is you, if you think of someone working a job that really doesn’t have a career pathway, a minimum wage job, it could be at a fast food restaurant, and they, we put them through one of our trainings, which is in five industry segments. So the trades, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, transportation and logistics, automotive, healthcare, manufacturing, those are all the the industry segments that we serve. So think about someone working a fast food job. We fully fund putting them through the CNA training. They get their certification, and then we place them with a health care member of our chamber. So it’s a win for these employers too, because as a member of the Sarasota chamber, they’re getting first dibs at this talent. As far as the individual, you think about just the change in the trajectory of their income earning potential over the course of their lifetime, and the the economic impact, both to to their own family and to the community as a whole. It really does put them on a pathway, whether it be it healthcare or think of an electrician that has many different certifications and levels. Same thing with plumbing and HVAC, it really does provide a career pathway for these folks to make some really good money and and, you know, be able to live a wonderful life here in Sarasota.

Brandon Burton 12:16
Yeah, so I like how you talked about the three parts that go into a program like this, between the funding, the educational partners, or who’s going to teach what we’re trying to preach here, and then the participants. So could you speak to a little bit about how you pulled like, how did you gather the participants? How did you reach out to them? How did you recruit those who would be the educational partners and talk about the funding for it as

Heather Kasten 12:41
well, sure. And you know, the exciting part, and the Chamber’s role is really kind of the unifier and the convener of those three pieces, but for the chamber, you know that that convening would not be happening, and so we, we play such a key role in that. But let’s start with the funding, we go out every year and sing for our supper. We work with many local foundations, some national foundations, some bank foundations to apply for these grants, and that’s the money that we have to work with each year we’ve been really fortunate. We have two local foundations that absolutely believe in the impact. They’ve seen it directly in this community, and they are substantial funders to the program. The participants through our chamber, you know, we work with, we probably have 200 nonprofits that are members of our chamber, where, when we’re putting up one of these. We call them a fast track program, where in like eight to 12 weeks, someone can get trained. When we are about ready to launch a fast track for instance, we have one coming up in automotive, electrical, and we put that out to our nonprofit partners. We have used the press to, you know, put out press releases and and social media posts. We partner with our faith based organizations. We we get the word out pretty well, and then these participants log on to our website, they fill out an application, and then they’re vetted. And then, you know, we take a class, usually of about 15 individuals to put them through this training and the chamber we play a pivotal role in that we really do Shepherd these folks through the program. These are individuals that have, they have more things on their plate than than others. And, you know, car breaks down, childcare issues, things like that, and we, we really are instrumental in in helping them to get to class and to have child care so that they can participate in the program.

Brandon Burton 14:53
That’s awesome. So for the those that are participating, sounds like there’s an application for. Process you selected in this example, 15 for the the automotive certification. Is there any fee or anything for those participants, or is it fully funded through the foundation and the grants? Or how does that structured?

Heather Kasten 15:13
It is fully funded so they, you know, they’re they do have some skin in the game in that there are some fees. For instance, in healthcare, there’s some vaccinations and things that they have to get on their own. But for the most part, you know, 98% of this training is fully funded, and so we do it. That is a big job, is to really bet the people who are serious this can’t be, you know, Grandma Jones wanting her grandson to go through this program, you know, we we have to make sure that, you know, that these participants are committed. We have to be a good steward of this money that we’ve been granted.

Brandon Burton 15:53
Yeah, so you mentioned that having that third party evaluation and seeing the the wage increases. Can you share maybe just a couple success stories you’ve seen out of that third party evaluation.

Heather Kasten 16:05
Absolutely, you know, on average, last last year, we saw the average wage increase of folks coming through the program was over $9 an hour. And you start doing the math on that, you know, times eight hours a day. You know, just to make it round numbers, that’s $100 more a day that they’re making. You think of, you know, 2020, working days in a month. That’s 2000 more dollars. You just start doing the math, and it is absolutely exponential, the money that someone is earning because of these programs. And again, this is, you know, for a lot of people, this is their first generation of being trained. And when we host these graduations, Brandon, it’s, it’s just heartwarming. Their whole family comes. They might as well be graduating, you know, from an Ivy League school. It’s that meaningful for their family. That

Brandon Burton 17:03
is really cool. I love hearing that. I love hearing the life changing impact that programs like this can make. So programs like this, like Career Edge, obviously help employers in the community find that talent where they’re able to continue performing their you know, their mission as a business, whatever it may be, but that’s only one aspect of it. I know in certain communities, housing can be an issue too, where you may have people that want to work there, but they live too far away, that it doesn’t justify, you know, the commute coming in, but housing is makes it difficult to attract that talent as well. So let’s shift gears into your second program that you guys submitted on your application around affordable housing and how that plays into this big picture.

Heather Kasten 17:52
Yeah, you know, like many communities, Brandon throughout the United States, our community is no different. Starting back, you know, when COVID we had 1000 people a day moving to the state of Florida. It has softened a little bit to, you know, around 700 people a day. But when you have that big of an influx of people, it just the the laws of supply and demand. It made it really hard. People were moving to the state, you know, cashing out in California, you know, one bedroom house for a million dollars, coming to Florida, paying cash and really pricing out all of our young professionals. And you know what I call our community heroes, the teachers, the firefighters, the policemen not being able to to find affordable housing here in our community. And so in 2022 our chairman of the board, you know, we really, he really had made it, you know, laid down the gauntlet that we are going to take a very proactive approach to affordable housing. And what we did was we hosted our first affordable housing Summit, and that would have been back in 2023 we partnered with our largest employer, Sarasota Memorial Hospital. We had over 200 business leaders attend. And really that summit was really focused on drilling down on the needs. This is not we’re not talking about folks who are on federal aid. These are working individuals, and so that was from that summit we took, okay, here we know we have a problem. It’s now the business community’s problem. So now what are we going to do about it? The Chamber went about we really wanted to drill down to investigate, like, who are having these struggles, we surveyed our young professionals. We had over 300 responses to a survey, and the results were just really disheartening. We had numerous over 30% of our young professionals saying they were contemplating leaving the area because they weren’t able to find affordable housing. We had over. 40% driving 40 miles a day to come to work, and as you know, that clogs up our roads and causes transportation issues when people can’t live by where they work. So we went about putting together a second summit, again, hosted back at Sarasota Memorial, where we brought in some experts. We brought in someone from the Florida Housing Coalition to assess what are some best practices. We brought down someone from Pinellas County, Florida, who is probably about five to 10 years ahead of us in the proactive nature of of tackling affordable housing. We hosted a second summit, and then we also took a very intentional approach with our city government and fought very hard hundreds of hours into attending City Commission meetings to back some zoning text, amendments, change, changes that would allow for greater density those after Many, many, many, many hours of meetings. The City Commission did vote to allow for greater density. And what that means is that a developer on one acre of ground, instead of being limited to building five units, of which he needs to charge $5 million a unit, when you increase the density, you could have 100 units at 200,000 and so we’ve already seen over 202,000 units, just because we fought for those zoning text amendments of affordable units that’ll be coming online here in the next two to three years. They’re going through, you know, that permitting process, they’re starting to come out of the ground. So again, if not for the Sarasota chamber, would these zoning text amendments have have gotten over the goal line. We also

Brandon Burton 21:48
go ahead. Go ahead.

Heather Kasten 21:50
I didn’t wrap up with we also partnered with four local foundations who commissioned a study to look at what is our current need, like, how many units do we really need? You know, you can’t, if you’re not keeping score, you’re really not playing the game. And so we had this study commission to look at how many units do we currently need, and how many will we need in 10 years, so that we can start planning, you know, for that. And then also took a look at the type of units needed? Do we need studio apartments? Do we need one bedroom, two bedroom? Or these families that are struggling? And so we just got those findings back, we have a program coming up in two weeks where they’re going to really go through the findings very descriptively, so that policy makers and developers so that we know what we need here in the future.

Brandon Burton 22:44
Yeah. So I guess that was going to be my question as to the type of housing. I would assume, something like condos or, like you said, the studios or the, you know, one or two bedrooms would depending on what those needs are. But also those young professionals today that are having those needs, you know, in 10 years. I’m glad that that’s that vision is being extended out to, what is that going to what’s that need? How’s that going to shift? You know, in the next several years? I know one of the other obstacles cities is communities look at solutions like this is the NIMBYs in the in the community, right? Those that don’t want it in their backyard. Has there been land identified for the more high density housing, and has that been approved, and has there been pushback from the community? How do you guys address that and overcome that?

Heather Kasten 23:34
Yeah, well, it’s fascinating. Nobody that you talk to is against affordable housing, just not in their backyard. Yeah, just not in my backyard, right? And so the uniqueness of the zoning text changes that that we worked on is that they’re along our major corridors. So these are very well traveled, you know, you’re not going to build a million dollar house on, you know, next to a four lane highway. And so the city was able to identify ground along these major corridors, along major, you know, retail, mixed use projects and and the exciting thing too is now, as developers are going before our planning board and our City Commission to get their projects approved, many of them are coming with an affordable housing component, and so they might be building, you know, they still might be building, you know, $2 million units, but they’re coming and saying, Okay, well, 15 of these, we’re going to go, going to make affordable, and with that, then they can build more units, so that, that’s Where that density thing comes into play the density bonus. And so we we have seen that is working. We are seeing projects that are coming online with an affordable component. So they’re going to be mixed in with the $2 million units. They might not be as big as the $2 million units, but they’re going to be in the same building and no. Is really going to know, you know, are you the $2 million homeowner? Are you the, you know, $250,000

Brandon Burton 25:07
homeowner? Yeah, I like that. I like when it can be blended in there and and you can’t tell, right? There’s so many interesting dynamics when it comes to housing, when there it comes to, you could maybe argue income inequality in certain communities, and when you get the higher density next to others, it just creates a lot of dynamics, but that chamber is perfectly positioned to be able to help navigate through those dynamics. So sounds like you guys are making a great impact there, and a lot of good headway. Is there anything else on the affordable housing front that you want to touch on before we move on?

Heather Kasten 25:48
Just you know that, you know, we’re still fighting that fight. Of course, there are some market factors. The influx of people moving to Florida has slowed, and certainly the market has cooled a little bit, which that is good for supply and demand and brings us down. It brings the market to more of a steady state. You know, for two and three years, it was on a left to right upward curve of pricing and lack of availability that, you know, lack of things on the market. And so that has cooled a little bit too. So I think it’s all of those things working together that are going to, you know, really help position our community to be, you know, more affordable for especially those key workers, like we talked about,

Brandon Burton 26:34
yeah, I’m in Texas, so we’ve seen a lot of that same, you know, type of growth. A lot of people leaving places like California and coming to places where they can buy a home for cash, and it prices a lot of people out, and then you get the congestion with the, you know, the traffic. And so it’s a continual problem, but we don’t have as many of the nice beaches that Florida has. So I mean, that just really compounds your guys’s problem there. So, but Heather, I wanted to ask, on behalf of those listening who want to take their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them towards accomplishing that goal?

Heather Kasten 27:13
I would say one thing that we have done that has really made a difference is really being intentional about taking care of your team. And we have put together the last two years a we call IT staff engagement committee that meets once a month to plan various things for us to do. It can be things like visiting, getting a behind the scenes tour at the airport. It could be touring, you know, an attraction here locally, it could be just going out for a happy hour, being very intentional. And we’ve also made a pretty significant investment into what I call like a team coach, someone who is working with us as a team, helping us to work together. You know, chamber life. It’s, it’s awesome, it is super fun, but it’s also exhausting. It’s always one thing, you know, one event to the next. It is, you know, you’re constantly out there hustling for for members, and it’s a lot on an individual and a lot on a team. And so one of the best things that I feel like I’ve been able to bring to the table as CEO is for us, for me, to really support and and not just put my, you know, it’s more than just, you know, ordering pizza once a month kind of thing, just being very intentional with what we do with our team and our staff. And just for instance, we had a monster event, probably our biggest event of the year last week. It was our Sarasota business awards of 600 person lunch with 10,000 moving parts. And you know, going into this week, I just was like, You know what we’re I’m going to call close the office on Thursday too. So this week, the team is going to have a four day weekend. And I think you can never invest in your staff. You the payback on that is tenfold.

Brandon Burton 29:12
Yeah, I love that. The whole idea of having a staff engagement committee, I think, is very intentional to make sure that their needs are being met, and making sure that burnout doesn’t kick in sooner than it should.

Heather Kasten 29:27
And also just the flexibility, you know, I will say that our chamber, I have someone who likes to get here at 5am every morning. Now he’s out earlier in the afternoon, and then I have people that come in at 830 and go till five. And so just the offering people like true flexibility in how they do their job, and that has also been, I think, really rewarding and really helped to keep people here and engaged. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 29:55
that’s great. I love that, that piece of advice, I like asking. Everyone we have on the show about the future of chambers, and how you see the future and purpose of chambers going forward.

Heather Kasten 30:08
Well, I absolutely believe in the work that we do. I do feel like the model has to constantly be evaluated and tweaked. And so, you know, the days of kind of just doing the rinse and repeat and the networking events. I just don’t know how relevant some of those things are. And I’m constantly challenging our team to look at how we’re doing things and what we’re doing, why we’re doing them. I think you know really going back to, how do you best serve a business? What does that look like? Because it looks different than it looked five years ago, that and looks different than 20 years ago, for sure. And so I think just really being up on the wheel as to what your business community needs, and then being able to provide that, and also looking at some of the things that maybe in the past have just been done, like, oh, that’s just part of your membership. You know, are there ways to monetize some of the work that, that that you’re doing? And in being able to put $1 value to that, and that’s good that, that’s what keeps me up at 3am is, you know, what does that look like? How do we continue to grow and and all of those things?

Brandon Burton 31:24
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. Well, Heather, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information, so that way listeners who may want to reach out and learn more about these programs or how you’re doing things at the Greater Sarasota chamber, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you

Heather Kasten 31:41
sure. Uh, my email. Super easy. Just hkasten@sarasotachamber.com, that’s going to be the best way to get a hold of me. I’d encourage anyone to check out our website, which is just SarasotaChamber.com It lists all of the programs, all of the initiatives that we’re currently working on, but I’d love to hear from you, and would love to learn from you as well. That’s a great thing about chamber business, is that we can all share ideas and best practices and and, you know, all really encourage and help each other to grow and be better.

Brandon Burton 32:18
Yeah, we’ll get that in our show notes, so it’ll make it easy for people to find it and reach out to you. But it’s been great having you back on the podcast again. Big congratulations to you and your team for making those big impacts in your community. I wish you guys the best of luck in Philly, and we’ll see what happens.

Heather Kasten 32:38
All right, thanks so much. Brandon, I really, am truly honored to be on the podcast. Thanks for all you do.

Brandon Burton 32:45
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2025 Chamber of the Year Finalist-Greater Jackson Chamber with Kyle Spurgeon & Lindsay Dawkins Moon

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

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2025 ACCE chamber of the year finalist series. And our guests for this episode are Kyle Spurgeon and Lindsay Dawkins moon, representing the greater Jackson chamber. Kyle is the president and CEO of the greater Jackson chamber. Under his leadership, the chamber was named 2024 Tennessee chamber of the year, and is one of only 174 accredited chambers in the US with prior experience at Jackson Energy Authority and at the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, Kyle has been instrumental in facilitating over $8 billion in capital investment. He serves on several statewide boards and was appointed to the Tennessee Board of Regents in 2023 Kyle lives with his wife, Melissa, their five children and two grandchildren and a spoiled dog. Lindsay is the Chief of Staff at the Greater Jackson chamber, where she leads the efforts in the forward Jackson investment, campaign, marketing and board relations, joining the chamber in 2022 Lindsay is a 2013 graduate of leadership Jackson. And outside of her professional life, she enjoys working out, traveling and supporting the Atlanta Braves, but Lindsay and Kyle, I’m excited to have you guys with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast, and I guess Kyle to have you back on the show, this is a good reason to be back as a Chamber of the Year Finalists. But congratulations. Want to give you guys a chance to say hello to all the listeners out there, and if you would share something interesting about yourself so we can get to know you a little

Kyle Spurgeon 2:47
better. Well, Brandon, thank you for the invitation to be back. And I hate to start something and correct something you said, but I need to make it perfectly clear that my wife and I do not live with five kids and two grandkids and a dog. We are empty nesters. Okay, they’re the two grandkids. We love them, but we can send them back.

Brandon Burton 3:09
I had all sorts of questions about that, so thank you.

Kyle Spurgeon 3:14
So that dog is uberly spoiled. So absolutely, yeah, we excited to be back on here and excited to be named a chamber of the year finalist. That’s such great recognition for our chamber, but for our team here and all of our investors, that’s where the credit goes, because they allow us to do something that I know I love to do every day, and the judging from the smile that Lindsay has on her face about 95% of the time, I think, I think she likes it too.

Lindsay Dawkins Moon 3:49
That’s great. I agree it for nine We’ll even say 98% of the time. You know, there’s always a few, few days, but it’s great and excited that we are a finalist. And I think it just speaks to like Kyle said, what our staff does, what our board does, what our community really is a part of. And so that’s always fun. I’ll give my fun little fun fact, I was actually talking to a friend about this. I always like to say, I’ve been to the Amazon before, and got to spend a few days roughing it in the Amazon. So not too many people that I’ve known have been able to do that, but that’s an interesting little trip a couple of years ago.

Brandon Burton 4:33
I bet that sounds like quite the experience. That’s awesome. Well, Kyle, would you tell us a little bit more about the greater Jackson chamber, just to kind of set the stage for our discussion. Give us an idea of the size of the chamber staff, the scope of work you guys are involved with budget and that sort of things, just to prepare us. Yeah, and

Kyle Spurgeon 4:55
I think you said something when you started this podcast about chamber champions. Uh, that’s something I think you can describe our team, that we’re champions for West Tennessee, specifically Jackson, Madison County. Our chamber, we have 1065 plus or minus members. Budget just over $2 million we serve. And I use this a lot. We’re kind of the capital of rural West Tennessee, where the largest city between Memphis and Nashville, right on Interstate 40. And there’s a lot of growth occurring here. You may be aware that blue oval city, which is Ford’s $5.6 billion project announced three years ago, they’ll be operational in 2027 so we’re seeing tremendous growth in this part of the country. And one of the things I brag about, and I wish I had come up with this, but it was a previous chairman 10 to 12 years ago, and it still holds true, is this chamber has a seat at the table at every major conversation that’s going on in this community, and that is either through a staff member, a board member, an executive committee member, whatever that is. So we are ingrained in this community and throughout West Tennessee, we’ve got great brand identity, and that’s something we protect very hard in what we’re doing through our program of work, how we’re influencing growth in this area. One of the things about Jackson, Jackson is we are extremely selective in that if you look at our economic development program, not every company that wants to locate in this area may be a fit for Jackson. So we’re we’re attracting companies high capex projects, lower employment count, two to three to 400 and then higher wage. That’s the type of stuff that we’re after. And then this chamber, we also do leadership programs, interact with our small businesses. We lead in many different ways. Just started a new effort this year that Lindsay led the State Games of Tennessee. The inaugural event was held over the past three weekends, and that was a huge success. And so we the recognition to be named a finalist for chamber of the year. I think really validates a lot of the work that we’re doing in Jackson and West Tennessee.

Brandon Burton 7:17
Absolutely, I would say. So that’s it’s a testament to the big strides you guys are making in the community and, and I love how you talked about being having a seat at all of the tables, all the discussions that are going on in the community, and, and I like how you pointed out that it’s not necessarily you that has to be at all the things, right? You’ve got board members, ambassadors, you know, people sitting on different committees and so forth that are out there with the seat at the table, and I think that’s a huge lesson for chambers listening to leverage those volunteers and committee members and board members to really get out there in the community and make that impact. Thank you for

Kyle Spurgeon 7:58
that. Yeah, I think in my role as the president, CEO, and I’ve been in this spot for 15 years. I don’t have to know everything. I don’t have to know the answer to everything. My main job is being able to connect and facilitate so people can get those answers and we can push things forward. And with that, yes, we’ve, I’ve been very fortunate through my career here in the team has changed over time, but we’ve always had good people here, and we attract good people and their hearts in the right place. And, you know, in the chamber world, there’s no room for narcissist, right? And they spread that love around. It’s not about, you know, we all get credit at different times for different things, but your success is built around the team,

Lindsay Dawkins Moon 8:40
absolutely. And I think Brandon, to add to that of you know, he talked about, we have a seat at the table. Sometimes that the lead seat, but sometimes that is just a seat at the table and helping and being in a supportive role. And so I think of being part of that team, but knowing our place on the team and knowing what is best for the community. Because, yeah, sometimes we do have to champion things and be in some of the projects that we’ll talk about that some of them, we have more supportive role, and some we are leading it. But I think that that’s a big thing of talking about our team, that we it’s not that we need credit for it. We really do want the best for Jackson, Madison County in the region. Yeah. So

Brandon Burton 9:25
important to understand your role, to have the seat, but understand the role, and to not take on more than the chamber can handle either, but be involved with it all. So thank you for that distinction. So in these chamber of the year finalist episodes, I like to spend the majority of our time highlighting the two programs of work that were submitted in your chamber of the year application. So we’re going to dive into those as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Brandon Burton 12:40
All right, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’re going to cover the two program synopsis that were included in your chamber of the year application. Lindsay, it’s my understanding you had a significant, pretty significant role in the application and pulling everything together. So I’d like to hand the microphone over to you and have you highlight, I know there’s two different programs, one about an airport, one about move to Jackson. Do you want to highlight move to Jackson for us first, and what that program, what the origins were, kind of the background and and how things have evolved to what it is today.

Lindsay Dawkins Moon 13:20
Yeah. So you know, when we think about the region, and what has taken place over the past several years is industries are moving here. Kyle mentioned Blue Oval city, and the development that has happened a little west from us, that people are moving here, but they have a choice, and so it’s, where are they going to live? Where are they going to raise their family? Where are they going to spend their dollars? And so Jackson is a great place to live and work and play and raise a family. And we know that we’re we’re champions of it. We believe it, but we need to tell others and also help our industries filling those employment gaps that they have. And so our move to Jackson campaign is that initiative to help bring people to our area to live and to be able to work and raise a family. And so we started this about a year and a half ago as a thought of, once again, in direct response to Blue Oval city of we need something, an active campaign to help attract people, because we have our visit Jackson, which is for tourism, but moving to Jackson is different From being a tourist and so different focus, exactly, and so we kind of spearheaded this project and creating a website that people could go and find a I like to call it a one stop shop of all things Jackson. You’re going to get a brief overview of everything from quality of life to. Health care to education to housing to job opportunities. And then we’re going to send you kind of where to go and find deep information of but on the surface level, you can find everything about Jackson on this site. And then from there, of being able to actually do some direct impact, direct targeting for folks. And so we we want to obviously target Blue Oval city. And so we have lots of geo fencing around that area to kind of send those messages of, Hey, Jackson. We have jobs available. We have good quality of life. We have excellent education and different options. And then, once again, just things to do. So different messages that we are sending to different folks. Louisville City is one of them. And then we also are targeting our healthcare workers, because we have a partnership with West Tennessee healthcare that nursing is also an area that we need more nursing, nurses in our area. And so we’re able to geo fence these schools, the universities that they actually recruit from. So always like to say, we’re those creeper people that you know you you get those messages, and you’re like, how did they know? Or how did they Right, right? And so some other different ways that we’re doing this is, it’s called War notices. So when businesses industries, if they’re closing, they have to report to the state of how many people they’re laying off, if it’s temporary, if it’s furloughed, and dates that go with it. So we actually look at states all surrounding us, and states that we know people are moving from, and we keep up with their war notices. And so we geofence those industries that are closing, okay, we’re particular to and what we do. And we’re, we have certain targets that our industries need. And so we’re, we’re pretty specific in who we’re kind of after. And

Brandon Burton 17:16
so is there a certain radius that you target with the geo fencing in those communities? Like, would you go, I don’t know, 10 hours away in a car drive, or how close do you try to keep it to Jackson? So

Lindsay Dawkins Moon 17:29
we have a 200 mile radius, okay, that we do. And then just from hearing from realtors and other research that we know there might be some other states, maybe outside of that 200 mile radius, but we know that people are coming from that area, or jobs that are similar, that people would potentially be moving from that and so we’re doing that, and then we also from we do a wage and benefit survey, where we partner with Union University, and they do this interview and different metrics with our industries, but they also have these employment codes that can say, Here’s engineering, here’s mechanical engineering, and it’s based on codes, and we know how many people within our current existing industries of what they need? Kind of, okay, we need 50 mechanical engineers in our area, so we’re actually taking those codes and we can put that into our data that we’re doing for geo fencing, LinkedIn, Facebook, all of that stuff as well. Like I said, it’s one of those really creepy things that you like. How can you even do some of this stuff? But our main focus, though, is being strategic. Of thinking about like, okay, plant closings that are similar to us, yeah, or jobs that are people are already here looking for. This is what we need, because we want to support our existing industries in the work that they’re doing, and they’re the jobs that they need. And so that’s what these marketing efforts are are doing, and, yeah, helping refill the people that they need, and then just we’re getting random people from just outside, because our cost of living is lower, our housing cost lower than a lot of other places. And so they’re being attracted to our area, yeah.

Brandon Burton 19:35
So I think of you know, a lot of chambers traditionally have done and still do like relocation packets, right? Yep, and I see move to Jackson as almost being a virtual relocation packet that connects all those dots for somebody looking to relocate to a community, to your community. I’m curious more on the geo fencing, because being strategic and. Yeah, I think a lot of listeners, they may know or they’ve heard of geo fencing, and I don’t expect you to give a full tutorial on how to do it, but how could somebody get started in learning about geo fencing and kind of get the groundwork of how that works?

Lindsay Dawkins Moon 20:15
I think my best advice is, I will tell you I’m not an expert in this at all it is. It is very nuanced and detailed. It can be as basic as you want it, but then as detailed as you

Brandon Burton 20:30
can tail it in the better, it’ll work exactly.

Lindsay Dawkins Moon 20:33
And so we kind of looked at early on, okay, do we want to take this on ourselves, or do we want to actually bring in a partner? And our best case was, let’s bring somebody in, and this is all they do. Smart and so we have a chamber member that their business is this, that that’s what they do, and they have actually worked with a couple relocation places in different parts of the country. They worked at a place in Pennsylvania where they were it was an entity there trying to get people who have lived there, grew up there, they moved and they were trying to get them to come back. So different targeting campaigns for them and so just having their experience, to me, is the best case. Not saying that people can’t do it on their own, but if you have somebody that is skilled in that area, I would, I would go with them, because you’ll get your bang for your buck.

Brandon Burton 21:38
Yeah. Kyle, do you have anything you want to add to the move to Jackson campaign? Or did Lindsay, yeah, cover it all.

Kyle Spurgeon 21:47
It’s so Lindsay talked about, you know, the external part of that, where we’re going out, the inward piece is it’s really been helpful. It’s a tool for us, for especially our real estate folks and our HR managers that if I’m in a meeting or someone from our economic development team, hey, we are struggling. We’re trying to get some folks to move here, whatever. We don’t have enough resources. We point them to that website. And one of the things we’ve done, of course, in the chamber business, we are, we are very protective of our members this website, although it’s done, by the way, by the chamber and funded through our investors, there are folks on there, and we may point folks or that look at the site to non Chamber members. Now, of course, we’re trying to get them to join, but if you’re looking at moving here, as good as our chamber is not 100% of the business is the law, yeah. So it’s become a real tool for us. And you know, you mentioned looking at what chambers do, the relocation packages, yeah, let’s be very honest, that is inefficient. You’ve got somebody pulling together all these magazines and maps and different things and loading them up into a piece and sending it out. And that’s not, in our opinion, the best way to do it. Send them to your website. You look at it on your phone, look at it on your computer, whatever. That is much more efficient, and it’s easy for us to give other people the opportunity to utilize that site? Yeah,

Brandon Burton 23:24
makes a lot of sense. Well, let’s shift gears to the second program, or the other program that was on the application regarding the airport Lindsay. Do you want to kick off with that program was,

Lindsay Dawkins Moon 23:39
yeah. Yeah. So this one, I love our move to Jackson, and I get to work directly with that, and it impacts a lot of people, but our airport is a very tangible thing that people can see within our community, and has made, I’m going to say, a big strides in continuing, making a big impact in Jackson, but not just there the region. And so we’ll, I’ll talk a little bit about it. I’ll let Kyle talk more details of it. He was involved a little bit more than I was in the back end of it, but so we were able to help. And this is where I go back to if we lead or if we support, and you know, we kind of led move to Jackson campaign and the airport was we, we led at times and supported at times. I felt like we were a little bit of both in in our role. And so for the longest time, and I will say I was one that flew it a couple of times that did not have the greatest experience of we had his fed, what eight to 10 people on it that went to Atlanta. Sometimes it would make it there. Sometimes it would get canceled. I had one of those. Ships where it got delayed and delayed and ended up missing a connecting flight. And so I was a big proponent of us getting an upgraded air carrier. And so we were able to help facilitate getting a 50 seat jet service. And part of the Essential Air Service was the department of transportation here in Jackson. And when you talk about having an eight to 10 seater that sometimes made it to Atlanta, was late a lot of times. And then we go to a 50 seat jet that is on time over 95% of the time. That’s a huge difference of what this works does for our community and the region, of giving them an opportunity. And Denver air connection not only goes to Atlanta, but it also goes to Chicago. And so we have opened another door of travel, and not just domestic travel, but international travel, because you think of both Chicago and Atlanta hubs for international connections. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 26:14
that’s that’s a great backdrop, I think, to kind of set the stage for the airport and why the need was there, Kyle, can you tell us more about what the Chamber’s involvement was like? Lindsay said, sometimes taking the lead, sometimes in support that that seems like a hard balance to keep in place, but you guys have pulled it off. So tell us what the involvement was and how that worked.

Kyle Spurgeon 26:37
Yeah. And I’ll say, you know, there’s a saying. I think there used to be a lot of T shirts you could buy. It’s either lead, follow or get the heck out of the way. Yeah, we seldom get the heck out of the way. He just Lindsey described this exactly right. There were portions of this that we led. There’s other parts where, yeah, our expertise is not airports. So we were a partner, but all throughout it, we are a part of that effort. And yeah, we did. I think the last time Jackson had jet service was back in the late 1990s and your listeners, unless you’re driving, don’t do this if you’re driving, but pull up a map and look at where Jackson is, right on Interstate 40, as I said before, between Memphis and Nashville. And when you’re traveling somewhere, you go to a website, and you know, if you’re going to New York City, if you’re going to Chicago, Atlanta, your choice is really or fly out of Nashville or Memphis, which are both great airports. We are blessed to be two hours from Nashville and an hour and 10 minutes from the Memphis airport. So those are choices, but we didn’t have the type of service that a capital city, as we’ve described earlier, in a region like ours really needs to continue to grow. And the demands were there to continue service to Atlanta. We consistently heard, hey, just get us to Chicago now. We have that with Denver air connection. They’ve been a great partner to this community. We have TSA service in place, and TSA and you think about this, if you’re going, if the flight is booked solid, it means you’re going to be the 50th person on the plane.

Brandon Burton 28:22
DS DFW is my airport by it. So having only 50 people online is a dream. You know,

Kyle Spurgeon 28:28
I’d love that. And we have a lot of companies with headquarters, or folks that live in Chicago, in Atlanta, they can now fly directly here, and everything is there, rental car service, parking, and, gosh, it may go up to five to 10 bucks a day, but right now, parking at our Jackson Regional Airport is free. Wow. What this will do for us? It’ll make us Tennessee’s sixth primary airport. And on the number side of that and the dollar side, it means we’re going to qualify for another $850,000 in FAA funding, which for a small regional airport, that is a lot of money. Some other things about Denver air connection. They have code share agreements with Delta united and American Airlines, I think they either recently did or let it, or adding Alaskan Alaska Airlines to that. So it is a I was just on the phone with a friend Sunday, who had flown to Chicago and was coming back. And it’s, it’s been a fantastic upgrade for our community, and it puts us more on the map, as far as a place that’s recognized as a destination. Because, you know, if you’re a town the size of Jackson, our county is 100,000 over 60,000 in the city, people expect reliable commercial air service. We now have that. And. And our hope is that, because now, you know, folks are never happy. It’s like, Alright, you got Chicago and Atlanta. When are we going to

Brandon Burton 30:08
Dallas? Right? That was my next question. You gotta be coming to Dallas next. Right?

Kyle Spurgeon 30:14
My answer is, utilize what we’ve got. And I’m sure Denver air connection will consider other routes. But right now, we’re being very successful. The plane’s not always full, as with any plane, but you see 3040, 45 people on those jets majority of the time.

Brandon Burton 30:32
That’s great. Hey, that’s such a huge impact in the community. And I can imagine as blue oval city, you know, gets up and running to in a couple of years here like that, need for the airport is going to be that much more. And I’m sure those flights will be full pretty much every time. And

Kyle Spurgeon 30:50
you look at Blue Oval city, it’s about 25 minutes from the airport, and blue oval cities at exit 42 between Jackson and Memphis, it is easier to get to Jackson Regional Airport than it is the Memphis airport. Now, naturally, Memphis has got more flights and choices, but if flying to Chicago or Atlanta or connecting through one of those destinations is your preference from that site is much easier to fly to Jackson.

Brandon Burton 31:20
Yeah, huge upgrade. So that’s awesome. Well, as we begin to wrap things up here, I wanted to pose a question to both of you. We’ll get a two for one here. But for those listening who want to take their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you suggest in them trying to accomplish that goal?

Kyle Spurgeon 31:46
Lindsay, you want to go first? Or

Lindsay Dawkins Moon 31:48
that’s a really good question, and it’s hard to narrow it down to just one thing, because there’s so many different things that could be. I mean, I mean, I think when I think of the greater Jackson chamber, I think of our team that we’ve built, and if you have a good, cohesive team, it makes all the difference. And not saying that other chambers have bad teams or anything like that, but making sure that you’ve built a good team, that it kind of like Kyle said, he doesn’t have to be at everything, because he’s built a team that can do the job and get the job done, and are passionate people in their areas, skilled in their areas, and are doing great work within the community. So building a good team. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 32:43
I think that’s great.

Kyle Spurgeon 32:44
Yeah, you’ve made my answer easy and Brandon, I’m not going to take the easy way out, although it sounds like it. I’m going to expand on the team piece, okay, because you have to have that good internal team in place, calling internal the chamber. External wise, we have a great team just specifically on the economic development side, city of Jackson, Madison County. We are the quarterback of all economic development activity. Jackson Energy Authority. Here is a member of that team, Mandy White, who is our Chief Economic Development Officer. She leads those efforts, and it’s very selfless everyone on that team. No one cares who gets credit. But we all show up. We know what our role is, and we pursue those projects. And I will tell you the number of projects once they visit Jackson, our closure rate is extremely high with those because they see a team, and they see a team that works together extremely well. And do if we offer a package to an industrial client, or we make a statement at a meeting, they see that on the back end, we do that. We take care of it. We take care of our existing industries. We take care of our small businesses. Here, we run those great leadership programs, but it’s not one individual, it’s not one person, it is that entire team, and it starts with the Chamber team, but we wouldn’t be successful without that community team out there allowing us to do our work. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 34:17
I love that answer, so that’s perfect. I like being able to have that vision, get all the staff on board, have that broaden out to the community at large. Of here’s the direction that our community can go and catch that vision and get everybody on the same page with it, and the chamber is perfectly aligned to be the driver of that. I love that answer, but I like Go ahead. Yeah, I want

Kyle Spurgeon 34:41
to, if we’ve got one minute, I want to brag on our team here, something absolutely I mentioned to you few weeks ago. We started with the inaugural State Games of Tennessee. Lindsay. You’re not going to negotiate with her on anything, but I’ll tell you, she’s a tough negoti. We had a crew come in that managed all the AV for our opening ceremonies to get the rate a little bit less expensive. Lindsay volunteered our entire team to help set up a stage. Now, this wasn’t any stage. It came with a with a full crew, and they were they said, here’s what you gotta do. This what the stage looks like. So as CEO, I said, and watched when our team got directions on what to do, but those directions were not specific to Lindsay, you do this. Kyle, you do that. Logan, you do this. We all fell into place. And the next thing I know, it’s like an assembly line. But no one was told where to go. And I sit back, and I’ve shared this story a lot, it just it made me extremely proud to run an organization to where no one said, Hey, I gotta do this, or you do that. The job got done. It got done very efficiently, and everyone fell into place and did it the way they should, and didn’t worry about themselves. They worried about the team, and we got it done. That’s

Brandon Burton 36:05
a great example, and you got to save a few bucks on it, too. So great job. Lindsay

Lindsay Dawkins Moon 36:11
and and our, our tech company, said that we were the best to work with. So that’s awesome.

Brandon Burton 36:19
So I like asking everyone I have on the show about the future of chambers. So how did, how did the two of you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward may

Kyle Spurgeon 36:30
start this time. Lindsay, I’ll let

Lindsay Dawkins Moon 36:32
you go first. Then, yeah,

Kyle Spurgeon 36:34
I see chambers in that are run well and have the support in a community continuing to broaden their influence. And you know, we talked earlier about those tables, we set more tables too, and we invite other folks to that table. And when you organize your effort, and you lead a team with your chamber, and then that community team, it enables your chamber and your community to grow more and more efficiently. So what I see is that those chambers that have the vision are able to set in an increasing role the vision for the entire community, because we’re conveners and facilitators, and when you do that, right, you’re going to be able to influence that change and make suggestions and get more buy in that’s going to lead to success for your community. So I see us becoming even more influential than we are now.

Brandon Burton 37:36
Yeah, you upgrade your airports by doing that. So that’s right, that’s right. Lindsay, what’s your thought on the future of chambers?

Lindsay Dawkins Moon 37:44
Yeah, I think, you know, I’ve only been in the chamber business for a few years, but being in, you know, prior experience of organizations that were part of chambers and involved in them, I think it’s just, it’s becoming so much more you have the, I’m going to say, membership side, and you have to take care of those members, but that is just a very small piece of what the chamber and what their future kind of looks like. And I think kind of piggybacking on Kyle of being more change makers and leading that change within the community, but also obviously staying within the vision and mission of the chamber, and also changing within the times of the community as well. Because I think one of our biggest things is we see what’s happening at the moment or in the future, and it changes. Airport wasn’t necessarily a big topic many years ago, but recently it is. There’s projects that we’re working on right now that I would say 10 years ago really wasn’t important to our community, but it’s important right now, and we get to be the people that lead those conversations, and and so I think it’s just being able to change within the times within your community, and being a little you’re still serving your members, but that’s not all you’re doing. It is really being that change maker for your area.

Kyle Spurgeon 39:16
Yeah, Brandon, I want to add you, don’t you forget. I want to add one more thing, sure, what Lindsay just said, because we talk about team, and I want to brag on our team here again, if you lead a chamber, part of your personality had better be you’re the idea person. And I’ve been here 15 years, and I look back, you know, when I travel, whether it’s for chamber or personal whatever, you send emails or texts back, because you learn something in another community. You learn something at a conference. There is no way that a chamber can take all the ideas that the CEO generates. So you’d better surround yourself with folks, and in my case, like Lindsay and Mandy and others that are here, they can help you filter those ideas. Because if not, yeah, we’ve all got a mission statement and a vision, but there’s so much that we can do, but you must be strategic in figuring out where you need to spend your time. So folks that sit in my tight chair as the president and CEO surround yourself with those people who are not afraid to tell you, No, gosh, Kyle, that’s a great idea, but we got to focus on this, and that’s what’s going to make you successful. Yeah?

Brandon Burton 40:26
And keep that book of ideas, because it may come in handy in the future, but right now, let’s stay the course,

Lindsay Dawkins Moon 40:32
right? Yeah, that’s, that’s what I tell him. It’s a, it’s a, maybe no right now, but later, it is going to be a really good one, right? Yeah,

Brandon Burton 40:41
that’s great. So this has been fun having you both on the podcast. I want to give you a chance to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you guys are doing things there in Jackson. What would be the best way for them to reach out and connect, and where would you point them?

Kyle Spurgeon 41:00
When do you go for I mean, I’m going to give my direct email.

Lindsay Dawkins Moon 41:04
Yeah, I think that that’s the best way our I mean, our website is JacksonTN.com, but the easiest way to reach out to us is email. Mine is ldawkins@jacksontn.com.

Kyle Spurgeon 41:18
that is kspurgeon@jacksontn.com.

Brandon Burton 41:24
that’s perfect, and we’ll get it. Get both your emails and website and our show notes for this episode to make it easy to find. But um, again, thank you for spending time with us today, on on Chamber Chat Podcast, for really setting a high bar on on what chamber should be doing, the impact that we can be making in our communities. And I wish you guys and your team Best of luck as Chamber of the Year.

Lindsay Dawkins Moon 41:47
Thank you. Brandon.

Brandon Burton 41:50
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