Tag: Atascadero Chamber

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

Brandon Burton 00:01.218
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton. And here on the podcast, I introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. Our guest for this episode is Josh Cross. With more than 20 years of experience spanning city planning, economic development, and Chamber leadership, Josh is a driving force behind business and community advancement in San Luis Obispo County.

A lifelong resident of the region, he brings both professional expertise and a deep understanding of the local landscape. Josh began his career in urban design and planning, nearly 18 years with RRM Design Group.

During that time, he led and contributed to a wide range of projects, including general plans, community and specific master plans, trail systems, design guidelines, entitlement processes, and entitlement processing efforts throughout California.

He later transitioned into the Paso Robles Chamber of Commerce as Director of Economic Development, where he advanced initiatives focused on business retention, expansion, and attraction. In 2020, Josh became the CEO of the Atascadero Chamber of Commerce. Under his leadership, the organization has doubled its membership and grown its annual budget from approximately $460,000 to over $1.1 million, while expanding staff and services.

initiatives including the launch of Get Your Business Online, expansion of workforce development services, and growth of the Bridgework co-working space as a regional entrepreneurial hub. His leadership earned him the WACE Rusty Hammer Award.

Brandon Burton 01:50.538
Josh remains actively engaged in the region and industry and leadership serving on the SLO County Workforce Development Board and the Central Coast Zoo Foundation and the WACE Board and Executive Committee, where he helps to shape the future of the chamber profession. Let’s welcome Josh Cross to Chamber Chat podcast. Josh, I’m excited to have you on the show with us today and we’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 little better.

Josh Cross 02:23.419
Hi, Brandon. Hello, Chamber Champions. First off, Brandon, what an honor to be asked to be on your podcast. I’m just really thrilled to shine a light on the work that we do here in Atascadero and just shine a light on Atascadero in general. just a small community of 30,000 people, but I like to say that we have a freakishly large chamber for a community of our size with almost 700 members.

Brandon Burton 02:51.434
Thank

Josh Cross 02:52.555
And that keeps us pretty busy. But in terms of something that you asked about, something interesting about…

Brandon Burton 02:55.022
Thank you.

Brandon Burton 03:01.096
Thank you.

Josh Cross 03:03.753
Again, I think it’s interesting to note that I am a local born and raised in Atascadero. what, let’s see, I am an Eagle Scout. I got the project here, did my project here in Atascadero. nice. Love that. It’s fun, it’s fun to drive by my Eagle Scout project here in town.

Brandon Burton 03:17.44
Awesome.

I am as well, we’re in the eagle’s nest together. That’s awesome.

Josh Cross 03:32.715
and see it still standing. did like a drinking fountain like 35 years ago. was so long ago.

Brandon Burton 03:38.447
It’s still working. That’s great. I love that. Well, tell us a little bit more about the Atascadero chamber. Just give us an idea. You mentioned about 700 members. Mention the budget in your bio, but give us an idea of the size, staff, scope of work you guys are involved with. Just to kind of set the stage for our discussion.

Josh Cross 03:43.147
Yes.

Josh Cross 04:00.041
Sure.

Yeah, well, interesting tip about Task Arrow. It means mud hole. So I’m trying to, you know, overcome just the namesake. But what I think the original founders were trying to say is that the community was found on water.

Brandon Burton 04:07.916
Hahaha!

Josh Cross 04:18.737
So even though many regions in California, especially around us, have water challenges, we seem to have our own independent water supply. So, you know, we call it more of a land of murky water, not so much a mud hole, but Tesco is actually a really beautiful location. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s located exactly halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles on the coast of California. And we’re just one community south

of wine territory. So we’ve got 300 wineries in our backyard, keeps us very busy and we get to enjoy lots of amazing wines that way. Our chamber is, yeah, about 700 members. have a staff of…

Brandon Burton 05:03.209
Very cool.

Josh Cross 05:12.363
about 10 that includes full-time, some part-time, and some contract staff. And let’s see we have a board of 17 and

See, our office is located right in downtown Atascadero and we also operate a co-working space which we call Bridgeworks and that seats about 20 small businesses within our footprint here.

Brandon Burton 05:43.618
Very cool. I grew up in Sacramento, I’m kind of familiar with the area and you guys are sitting in a great spot there, especially close to the coast.

Josh Cross 05:53.196
Yeah, yeah, right. I didn’t mention that about it’s about 20 minutes to the closest beach, so not too far.

Brandon Burton 06:02.104
Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, I’m excited for our conversation today. We’re gonna move fast as we cover a lot of ground, but all related to workforce, workforce development on multiple different levels. So we’re gonna dive into that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

All right, Josh, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, today we’re going to cover several points about how you guys are approaching and attacking workforce development at the Atascadero chamber. First of all, I know you guys have some interesting workforce development partnerships. Do you want to start there and tell us about those and how those partnerships came to be and what they mean for you?

Josh Cross 06:49.077
Yeah, happy to. You know, kind of looking at workforce, know, the bigger umbrella being economic development, and that is certainly a passion of mine, having come from a background and doing that work for a few years, but really kind of seeing the need of or the place for a chamber to support the business community through workforce development and

especially a few years ago, we polled our membership and asked them where could they use help. And was a lot of folks saying we need help hiring and retaining qualified staff members. So we reached out to our workforce development board and I got involved with them and eventually we got a contract with them whereby we are retained to offer VOA services.

with WEX and OJT type partnerships between another entity and the employer. And so our employers are able to have either free or low cost assistance for a certain amount of time. And so that’s a great way for the employer to again get free or low cost help, but also for the employee to get.

really valuable on-the-job thing, OJT, or WEX Workforce Experience. And the partnerships that we have created between these employers and these employees are just really special and it’s great that the Chamber can just be in the middle of that, helping connect the dots between employees and employers. And one of the programs that we’re really proud of here at the Chamber, we have two staff supporting us during this work.

ours, they divide their time among the two, the two ends of our county. We have a North County staff and a South County staff between them. They’re out in the field every day, talking to different business owners, talking about the resources available through them, to them through workforce development, especially these OHAT and WECH programs. And, we connect with hundreds of businesses every year and connect them.

Josh Cross 09:11.371
at just as great a point for a champion to be involved in.

Brandon Burton 09:15.606
That’s awesome. I love that you guys have formalized some of those partnerships and made that, you know, like you said, putting the chamber in the middle to help connect those dots and keep those connections strong. It’s right where a chamber belongs. So you guys have found your spot for sure.

Josh Cross 09:27.006
Yeah.

Josh Cross 09:31.228
It does and it’s one of those things that we can offer something to a member or especially a non-member that really helps them understand the work that a Chamber of Commerce does. They often wonder what do we do and then we can say we’re here, we’re with the Chamber, we’re here to help. We actually have something to help them with and we can pair them with an employee right away.

Brandon Burton 09:48.087
Right.

Josh Cross 10:00.332
I’m not much of a salesman myself. I have really good people on my team that do sales, but early on I knew that I wanted to create programs that I could tell non-members about that would make them just want to be a part of our chamber just because of the amazing resources that we’re offering.

Brandon Burton 10:22.946
Yeah, if you can attract them, you don’t have to sell them. You just attract them and help them come.

Josh Cross 10:28.255
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. If the value is clear, the choice to join our chamber is very easy.

Brandon Burton 10:37.592
That’s right. So one of the, guess I’m going to call it a program that you guys did to focus around workforce development was Get Your Business Online. Can you tell us about that and where the idea came from and how you guys approached that? I I assume that the title says what it is, but tell us more about it and how it all works.

Josh Cross 10:49.536
Yeah.

Josh Cross 11:00.511
Well, I got to give kudos to Glenn Morris and the Santa Maria Chamber. They had an individual that was on staff that kind of did this work part time, you know, that you could call him up and he might help get your business on line. You know, we took that concept and we pursued grant funding from our county and a few other sources to formalize a more targeted program.

And so we were able to retain a staff member to do get your business online. And the whole idea is to support businesses to either our new business or just don’t have a website or maybe they’re using one of those awful Facebook sites as their website and trying to put their menu on Facebook and you’re trying to, know, yeah, that’s what I was like at 2 a.m. I want to know that

Brandon Burton 11:54.395
I hate that.

Josh Cross 11:59.872
what kind of tacos that the taco place down the street has. And you’re looking at pictures of like Yelp menus and things like that. And I’m like, this has got to change. So that’s kind of how it came to be. And, you know, over the course of two years, we’ve helped 180 businesses get their business online. And there’s some real measurable outputs from that, meaning that,

some of them are, you know, their sales are increasing by $3,000 a month, $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month, or even more in a couple cases. So in terms of like the return on the investment from our county grants, you know, the county is super happy because, you know, those are tax dollars then coming back to them and then, so it’s worked out really well. But in addition to just getting your business online, what

doing is digital literacy training. So folks then know how to go back into their website and log in and change the price on a menu item or change the hours of operation, you know, or add another page. So it’s some training and the site and together, you know, that is just a win-win for our small businesses.

Brandon Burton 13:17.742
Yeah, so are there certain industries you mentioned rest the taco shop, right? You’ve been mentioned some restaurants but are there certain industries that are maybe a little more prone to? Having that need to get online and then how did you guys approach them to? To get them online

Josh Cross 13:36.224
Well, a lot of it came by word of mouth. So I would say that the, you know, we didn’t really target a specific industry, but the industries that step forward are restaurant, retail, contractors. These are people that are very busy just doing the basics of starting their business or keeping the business going on a day-to-day basis. And for whatever reason, they’re just too wiped out at the end of the day, or it’s not their expertise or they don’t know how to use.

you know, any of the web domains or the hosting platforms, you know, this is where we can come in and support them. And so, you know, we do some targeted outreach, you know, we market the program, we let people know it’s available to them, but, know, word of mouth is how we’ve gotten most of them and they tell their friends and then their friends want to start a small business or, you know,

We go on Facebook and we look for those businesses that just have those Facebook websites and we reach out to them. So it’s a bunch of different ways we’ve gotten the numbers that we did.

Brandon Burton 14:43.416
Yeah.

Brandon Burton 14:47.308
Yeah, so when you talk about getting them online, what all does that entail besides taking them off of Facebook as their primary place to point them to?

Josh Cross 14:54.359
Great question. Yeah, so you know we restart them at the beginning. We help them go to, you know, GoDaddy and we help them get a domain and make sure that they understand what that means and how to get it and record your password so that when it renews and you know one year, two year, three years that they know how to go back in and renew it. Then we get them connected with a web hosting platform and

lot of folks like to Wix because it’s free and it’s typically easier to use. It’s probably the easiest from what we found. then, you know, there’s more complex sites who are using WordPress or, you know, we give them a few other options. And then, you know, we kind of show them how to get in on the backend and how, you know, what to do if they need to make a change or, you know, change a color.

Brandon Burton 15:26.09
simple.

Josh Cross 15:50.358
whatever they need to do, add photos, for example. And it’s a living, you know, it’s meant to be a living site. So we commit up to eight hours per business to get them launched. That means we do eight hours of design work per business. So that means getting it drafted, meeting with them and doing refinements. And so we do have some parameters to kind of just protect our staff time about how much we can invest in it.

But the in-hour seems to be plenty, especially nowadays with all the AI capabilities of getting copy and imagery and all of that. So it works out well.

Brandon Burton 16:25.441
Yeah.

Brandon Burton 16:34.69
Yeah, I had an experience even just as recent as last week where I ended up having a surgery, actually a back surgery. But when I was meeting with the surgeon, my father-in-law was trying to do some help in the background, like trying to do research and everything. So he’s looking up the surgeon.

and on the surgeon’s website, he had a lot of good patient reviews, but the last, the most recent review was from like 2020. So for my father-in-law, that was kind of a caution flag of what’s going on. And I’m like, you know, he’s a surgeon. He’s not a web developer. So I’d met with him and he was a good surgeon. Everything was great. But it goes to the point of getting your business online. Once you have the website,

you should be keeping it up to date because who knows what kind of business has been lost on websites like that where it is dated or it brings up questions about how come there’s not more recent activity on this website because it should be a living site that keeps things up to date about your business. anything else about, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Josh Cross 17:42.773
Yeah.

Ben, you had surgery last week. You had surgery last week and here you are again? I was fast.

Brandon Burton 17:51.565
Right? Back at it. Anything else about getting your business online that we need to know about before we move on to the next point?

Josh Cross 18:04.459
Well, our chamber did receive a WACE award for being one of the top programs, and I believe in 2023. And so we’re very proud of this program.

Brandon Burton 18:14.166
Thanks.

Josh Cross 18:19.229
It is, you know, if it’s something that other chambers are interested in, it is a program that is ripe for grant funding, especially if you have, you know, economic development initiatives as part of your strategic plan or your vision. Adding a program like this allowed us just to bring on additional staff members to support it full-time. And it is, like I said, it’s ripe for funding. It’s a great opportunity for chambers to do to support their business community, especially the smallest businesses that need this.

Brandon Burton 18:20.046
Thanks.

Josh Cross 18:49.335
assistance the most.

Brandon Burton 18:50.934
Yeah, and these businesses can see that direct return to on that investment. It’s powerful thing. One of those things that really moves the needle.

Josh Cross 18:57.343
Yeah, yeah, now we have 100 % and now we have 180, you know, chamber members that will be with us probably for life because they just love this program. They’re so grateful.

Brandon Burton 19:10.7
That’s awesome. So next point around workforce development is you guys have had a focus on creating family-friendly workspaces. So can you tell us about that and the approach and kind of the genesis and what’s gone into that?

Josh Cross 19:26.975
Yes, this is a really wonderful program. Again, it’s another grant funded program that we found that there’s a real need in our region, more so than just a Tascadero, to elevate what it means to be a family friendly workplace and to put some…

parameters around what that means. And so this is a program that basically is a certificate program and we reach out to various businesses and give them different tiers to apply for. It’s bronze, silver, gold, diamond, platinum, and then we even have like blue diamond and a few other ones. So basically to get businesses to think about ways to

their business more family-friendly and what that can look like is you you could have your your absolute like highest tier is providing on-site child care for your employees and so we only have like two or three in our region that can do that so those are far few in between but at a minimum what businesses can do is have predictive scheduling so

that a week the week before the employees know what days they need to work the following week so that they can schedule childcare and pickups and drop-offs and doctor’s appointments. Do you allow your employees to attend the flexibility to attend parent-teacher conferences and leave a little early for a sports game and go to those doctor’s appointments? so allowing

flexibility to be able to do that. Not everyone can do that. Restaurants, it would be really hard to allow their wait staff to leave early to go do that kind of thing. But there’s different things that every business can do. Restaurants, predictive scheduling, more office environments, they can allow flexibility for their employees to spend time with their families. There’s also things like you offer lactation.

Josh Cross 21:41.835
Do you offer healthy snacks to your employees? Which our chamber does not qualify for because we have, you know, in our coworking space, have a snack wall and that’s where I draw the line.

Just sticking to the, you know, snacks you can get at Costco, but the no healthy fruits or vegetables. But anyways, there’s just a whole different series, a checklist of things that you can do. It’s available on our webpage, taskroomchamber.org. And you can go in there and start applying for it as a business to see which tier that you get. You get some recognition, you get a certificate, you get to,

you know, put on your website that you are a family-friendly workplace, you’re recognized as one. And, you know, it’s a badge of honor that our employers have really leaned into as a, actually it’s turned out to be kind of a recruitment tool for our businesses. Today, we’re a gold-level family-friendly workplace, and this is what that means. So it helps with retention and attraction for employees.

Brandon Burton 22:48.547
Yeah.

Brandon Burton 23:00.428
So does the chamber provide the branding for them to put on their website or things like that to announce that they’re the family-friendly workplace?

Josh Cross 23:06.699
just a little, yeah, just a little badge that they can put on their website so that, yeah, so they can show that off.

Brandon Burton 23:15.894
Yeah. And I love how you say, you know, every business has something that they can do to show that they’re striving towards, you know, just accommodating a family lifestyle. And it looks different in every business, but there’s something that everybody can do to make it work.

Josh Cross 23:30.751
to us.

What we see is our businesses like, you know, they might start at a gold or a silver tier and then the next year they might add a thing or change a policy or add a policy. And so we actually see businesses moving up from tier to tier to tier and we kind of coach them along the way about how to do that. you know, so it’s, see growth in this area and we see improvement and that’s, you know, that tells me that the program is working.

Brandon Burton 24:01.634
Yeah, that’s great. I love that idea and I love that it promotes that healthy family lifestyle. great job.

So you’ve mentioned a couple of times this co-working space and I’m always intrigued when chambers get involved with co-working spaces because everyone seems to have a slightly different approach to how they do it. So I’d love to know how you guys have approached it and what the setup is like for your co-working space.

Josh Cross 24:32.543
Yeah, the space was opened in 2018 as a way to grow small business in Atascadero. Atascadero is a bedroom community to the city of San Luis Obispo and somewhat to the city of Paso Rolos. So we are seeing too many of our residents leaving the community every day versus working.

We also know that this is a very popular area for Bay Area folks to work remotely. Silicon Valley is about a two hour drive and so there’s lots of folks here that work here and then you know maybe commute to Silicon Valley once a week, once a month, something

So we saw some opportunity to capitalize on the Silicon Valley folks and to kind of retain or regain our own economy here in Atascan. We’re losing too many people to leave to driving outside of the community. So providing a co-working space allows us to provide a lower cost facility for those maybe small businesses or even established businesses or tech businesses to organically grow.

So our space is about 3,000 square feet. It’s not giant, but we have 14 private offices and they’re filled with a pretty healthy waiting list. And we have architects, engineers, we’ve got people from Oracle, from Seattle that are working here.

electrical contractors, financial folks. We have waste trash services in here, we get a lot of foot traffic to the visitor center because of that. Tax service, so lots of different kinds of professional service type businesses. what’s great about it is, you know, we as a…

Josh Cross 26:48.861
It was a business decision by our Chamber of Commerce and our board to look for ways to raise revenue. so by having the co-workers here, we generate enough revenue to basically pay for our rent. So Chamber lives here rent-free. And we get boards, you know, these businesses. the idea is to help them grow.

Brandon Burton 27:08.535
Nice.

Josh Cross 27:15.017
And actually, ultimately, we love it when they leave because they’re adding employees and they’ve outgrown the space. So when a business comes here and they grow and they leave, we have a little celebration for them. And, you know, we wish them well as they move into their larger spaces. But it’s a great we are not an incubator or an accelerator. It’s simply a place to work and to hopefully grow a business.

Brandon Burton 27:44.558
Yeah, you guys were ahead of the curve opening it in 2018 before working from home and remote was so in style, right?

Josh Cross 27:54.7
Yeah, you know, it changed when the building first opened. It was a lot of communal space. it’d be, you long tables with people working around it together and headphones. And the model quickly shifted at COVID. And we saw all those people disappear. And then when they came back, they all wanted to pay more for a private office. So we’ve actually expanded our space twice to accommodate more.

Brandon Burton 28:02.327
Yes.

Josh Cross 28:21.995
private offices and we’re in a building that we’re lucky enough to be able to continue to grow so over the next year I think we’re adding two more offices and then there’s opportunity for us to move again but we just kind of we grow slowly so that we aren’t incurring a lot of debt and so we can just pay it as we expand.

Brandon Burton 28:44.622
So you mentioned private offices. Is it their full-time private office or do they share the office space with others like in a different schedule or is there different setups?

Josh Cross 28:57.995
Yeah, no, everyone has their own office and they don’t share. They’re not sharing. A us, husband and wife will share, even then they’re like, you know, husband will be in the morning and wife in the afternoon. they know there’s not a lot. And, know, I’m always surprised by our coworkers, the flexibility they have in their jobs as compared to like us chamber folks, or it’s like eight to five, Monday through Friday. They seem to have a lot of flexibility, which I’m always.

Brandon Burton 29:03.797
Okay, okay.

Yeah.

Brandon Burton 29:13.355
Okay. Okay.

Josh Cross 29:28.115
Always jealous though.

Brandon Burton 29:29.676
Right? That’s awesome. I love, I love seeing chambers venture into things like this and especially when it becomes a viable source of revenue and where the chamber lives rent free. And I just think that’s fantastic. So how’s the connection from the chamber office to the coworking space? Do you guys share a wall? Is it all part of the space? What does that look like? Okay.

Josh Cross 29:52.298
all part of the space. so, you know, our big piece of it is, you know, the chamber uses the co-working space pretty regularly. There’s a big lounge with like comfy, you know, chairs and couches. And we’ve got this big, beautiful kitchen that’s got a beer fridge, a wine fridge, you know, the snack wall, which no fruits or vegetables, right?

Brandon Burton 30:16.824
Right?

Josh Cross 30:19.371
We have a fancy espresso machine, so there’s a lot of amenities back there and our members love it as well. So we’ve actually allowed our members four hours use of the space per year as part of their membership benefits. And they love hanging out back there. And for those that need extra hours, they’re happy to pay to use the space for more hours. We get a lot of use out

Brandon Burton 30:43.64
Yeah, that’s great. Well, Josh, as we start to wrap things up, I wanted to ask on behalf of those listening who are looking to take their organization to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them as they strive towards that goal?

Josh Cross 31:01.193
Sorry, could you say that again? It just broke up a little bit.

Brandon Burton 31:04.394
Yeah, for those listening who are trying to take their organization up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item would you share with them as they strive towards that goal?

Josh Cross 31:14.015
Yeah, so if I’m looking at my crystal ball of what the future of chambers are going to look like in the next few years, I see that the work that we do is, of course, it’s very important, but it’s also very expensive to continue to do the work that makes an impact. And what I see the need for is chambers to come together with their

their neighboring chambers and look for ways to collaborate, to merge, to unify their chambers or have shared staffing models. That’s, I think, the future of chambers because I think the days are gone where it’s just a one or two person chamber that just does events. That’s just not an effective… As a chamber, you can’t be as effective when you’re just…

focused on the annual parade or the fireworks show. Doing this economic development work, workforce development work, that is really important work for a chamber to be involved in. And you can’t do it alone, not these days, not if your membership is three or 400 people. You’ve got to do it together. And I really feel like this emerging idea, this collaborative idea is the work.

there’s the future and quite honestly I need to you know take my own advice you know it’s something that we are talking about we haven’t done that yet but I see that as being our in our future and they know and in the next few years.

Brandon Burton 32:56.684
Yeah, well that answer may be stealing from my next question about how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Josh Cross 33:04.747
That definitely is, know, the chambers are, they’re problem solvers for sure. And so the problems of today are continued to be with, you know, they haven’t changed a lot, you know, unfortunately, but it is still important that chambers do advocacy, workforce development, economic development. And, you know, you can do that by

Brandon Burton 33:09.484
you

Josh Cross 33:34.347
If you don’t have the budget to do it yourself, you need to call up your friends and your neighbouring chambers and see how you can do it together.

Brandon Burton 33:43.532
Yeah, I love that. Well, Josh, I want to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you about any of these workforce programs we’ve talked about today. What would be the best way for them to reach out and connect?

Josh Cross 34:00.971
I’d be happy to connect with anyone and my email is josh@atascaderochamber.org. that’s A-T-A-S-C-A-D-E-R-O atascadero. Remember it means mug. Not the mug. Atascaderochamber.org. That’s the best way to get ahold of me. Also our website is fantastic and my contact information is on.

Brandon Burton 34:05.902
and that’s it.

Brandon Burton 34:23.814
I am a man of honor.

Brandon Burton 34:30.954
perfect. And I’ll make sure we get this in our show notes as well and make it easy to find. But this has been great having you on the show and I appreciate you setting aside some time to join us here on Chamber Chat Podcast. This has been a great conversation. Thank you.

Josh Cross 34:44.651
Thank you, Brandon Thank you, listeners.

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