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Strategic Initiatives in Action with Yvonne Myers

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Brandon Burton (00:01.038)
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 today is Yvonne Myers. Yvonne is the Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at the Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce, a role that she’s held since 2022 after a remarkable 31-year career with Columbine Health Systems.

Yvonne didn’t just pivot into this role. She brought her 14 years of board experience at the Chamber and a passion for building talent pipelines that meet real business needs. Under her leadership, the Chamber has secured over $2.1 million in grants to support work-based learning, sector partnerships, and workforce program development. She’s grown the talent team from a solo effort to a thriving team of three.

and currently chairs the NOCO works executive committee, a two county regional workforce initiative. Yvonne also serves on the boards of the arc of Larimer county and the early childhood council of Larimer county. When she’s not driving strategic change, you might catch her playing the string bass in the local band and orchestras. Yvonne, 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.

Yvonne Myers (01:34.82)
Well, Brandon, I’m excited to be here today and honored that you would ask me to participate in your podcast. So so hello, everyone. I’m excited to share the little bit of work we’re doing here. One thing I’ve learned about Chambers, it’s all about sharing and stealing and supporting each other for sure. So this is a great place to do it. So I really appreciate that. I think interesting fact is I was the first person in my family born in the United States. I don’t know why that’s cheering me up. But anyway,

first person to go to college. And so today is Fridays. We support Colorado State University. have a big basketball game this weekend. so having gone to university is very proud for my parents and it’s proud for me as well.

Brandon Burton (02:19.039)
Yeah, that is very cool. I love hearing stories like that. It’s awesome. America is a great place for that. Well, if you would tell us a little bit about the Fort Collins area chamber just to give us an idea of the size, staff, scope of work, budget you guys work with, just to kind of give some perspective before we dive into our topic today.

Yvonne Myers (02:26.522)
And it’s for sure.

Yvonne Myers (02:41.594)
Sure, yeah, the chamber, we’ve been here since 1904, so we’re not one of the oldest ones around for sure. We have 13 staff members, some are part-time, I think eight are full-time, the rest are part-time. We do have a couple of consultants that we have, subcontractors that we work with as well. We have a place-setting company that does some of our events, and we have a wonderful, cranky advocacy person that writes a lot of our things and supports that work for us. We have about a $2 million budget.

Brandon Burton (02:49.547)
Thank

Brandon Burton (03:06.829)
Good night.

Yvonne Myers (03:10.2)
that we work from, we also have, we’ve done a Northern Colorado Prosper’s event. We’re on the fifth year of our second NCP event where we raise about four and a half million dollars each one of those times to do work like work on transportation, advocacy, workforce, those sorts of things. We also do a total resource campaign every year. We just finished our 15th year of our total resource campaign called Moving Fort Collins Forward, exclamation point at the end of that.

Brandon Burton (03:16.013)
Thank you.

Brandon Burton (03:22.317)
Thanks

Brandon Burton (03:33.901)
Yeah, it’s just like being on the top of a spot, just playing with nature.

Yvonne Myers (03:39.262)
and we raised $536,000 this year for our sponsorships and our new members and all that sort of thing. So we have, you know, a volunteer team of about 50 that help raise funds for that. So we’re busy in the Fort Collins area. We also play well with the Greeley and Loveland chambers in our area as well. But we’re also, I would say, a pretty strong, strong lead in our region as far as the chamber goes.

Brandon Burton (03:41.901)
from the way I understand it, I was thinking the same thing.

So you have to be able to concentrate on the details.

Brandon Burton (04:05.249)
Very good. That definitely helps to give us an idea of where you’re coming from as far as the chamber goes. Today we’ll focus a lot of our conversation around that work-based learning, some of sector partnerships you guys are involved with, and some of these workforce programs that you guys are sponsoring. And we will dive into that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All Yvonne, we are back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re diving into some of these work-based learning and these sector partnerships you guys are involved with all around workforce development. I don’t know if there’s a certain area you want to dive into first. I think there’s a lot of branches to this, but maybe just tell us where you guys saw the need and how you guys are addressing the need. Maybe that’s a good place to start.

Yvonne Myers (04:49.645)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (04:56.154)
Yeah, so, you know, the governor in our state, Governor Hickenlooper back in the day in 2013 brought the sector partnership model to the state because he came from industry, right? I mean, he was a geologist and he also had a brewery and all those sorts of things. And our economy was not doing well and he felt like, well, industry is the one to bring that economy forward. So I was lucky to be on our local workforce board working at a long-term care company at Columbine Health Systems and

Brandon Burton (05:08.525)
Thanks

Yvonne Myers (05:24.438)
started the sector help start the health sector partnership and the chamber at the time said boy you know it’s industry-led we should be a part of that and actually became our fiscal agent for no fee we had somebody else doing it for eight percent and when i called the chamber and said can you help us out i hope to get only one or two percent and they actually said well we’ll do it for no cost it was like yay so all of our money was just great

Brandon Burton (05:47.905)
Wow.

Yvonne Myers (05:49.882)
And we are still that fiscal agent. 15, since 2013, we are now fiscal agent for five out of the six sector partnerships in our region. 2013, the House Sector Partnership and Manufacturing Sector Partnerships launched. We’re the two longest sector partnerships in the country that are still active. So that’s a pretty crazy thing we didn’t imagine. And then when I came to the chamber, we

Brandon Burton (05:59.404)
So.

Yvonne Myers (06:18.882)
I really felt like we needed to launch more industries around because I really believe in the sector partnership model of industry leading where things are going. They’re the one who purchased the product of education. They’re the ones that have the issue and opportunity. And I do think our workforce friends, our education friends, our government friends really do want to help us. But when we’re sitting in our businesses doing our work and they’re in their secret lab imagining what we need, it never works. It just doesn’t work.

Brandon Burton (06:36.611)
and turn it into a little bit a little bit.

Thanks

I love that. Just imagining, right?

Yvonne Myers (06:49.114)
So we have to get up out of our house and then speak to them and say this is what we need and they will magically help us, right? But we’re not there at that conversation. so, the vice versa also, which is they’re in their secret lab going, we know what industry needs. So we’re going to create this and they should be also including us in those conversations. So that really is a very basic tenet of the work that we do here is like industry needs to be there and you need to be speaking up. And so,

Brandon Burton (07:09.39)
So, we’re to have a great time.

Yvonne Myers (07:18.508)
When I started then, the nonprofit sector partnership, some of the nonprofits came to me who knew about sector partnerships said, we want to start one. And I was like, are you an industry? I know it’s a terrible question to ask, but I was like, are you? And so we pulled data around how many we have, how many employees, the economic impact, and went, holy buckets. And they don’t tend to show up in numbers because they’re tucked under government. They’re tucked under here. don’t really have to kind of pull them out of light cast in some of those places.

Brandon Burton (07:31.34)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (07:46.75)
Great.

Yvonne Myers (07:48.25)
We launched the nonprofit sector partnership. You hope to have 30 industry members at your launch meeting to get impact. We had 90 people there from nonprofit. You hope that they walk away with three things they want to work on. They want to work on five. know, nonprofits are used to roll up their sleeves and doing their work. And so we, our region had formed a TID attacks incremental district to

Brandon Burton (07:59.907)
Wow.

Yvonne Myers (08:16.826)
charge more, if you come here, you have to pay a little bit more to our hotels and motels and things. And then that money goes to marketing the region. And I said, well, you’re then already a sector partnership because you have to lay down your competition as industry and come together to work on issues you can collectively solve. So that was an easy lift of the hospitality sector partnership. So they’ve now been launched about four years ago. And construction launched during the

I mean, they launched like March 10th and then we all got shut down like the 20th, right? And so they did very little during COVID. They relaunched and they said, we’re gonna do a construction con. We’re gonna bring hundreds of kids in to learn how to, I mean, they bring in like big equipment and the kids actually get to sit on big equipment and do some things and all of that and do welding and that kind of stuff as well. so they…

Quickly, people want to write them checks, and they’re like, hurry to take the checks. And we’re like, we’ll be your fiscal agent. We’ll help you. So we provide directors and officers insurance. provide, we sign the contracts for the events they go to. We use our liability insurance. So all we do is create that frame for them to be successful and hold them up. And they go off and do the work, right, as well. So a year ago, we launched the Financial Sector Partnership. And I can tell you that.

Brandon Burton (09:21.102)
Thank

Brandon Burton (09:37.39)
Okay.

Yvonne Myers (09:41.221)
We kind of launch them all a bit the same with the leadership team and the committees of work you want to do. And then we let them be who they are. And they are completely all different. They have websites. And you can imagine it’s colorful and lots of stuff on the nonprofit. And the financial sector partnership is black and white. It’s very streamlined and much different. And so we get the opportunity to let them be who they are and do the work that they want to do.

Brandon Burton (10:05.806)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (10:10.508)
So with that, then received grant funds to the Health Sector Partnership came to us and said, we’d really like to do more work-based learning, but it isn’t working the way it’s going. Schools are calling us. We’re calling schools. It’s just like this disconnected mess. We don’t know which schools to call. Schools are reaching out to us multiple times. We were getting asked too much. So.

We collectively wrote a grant between the school districts in our region, the health sector partnership, and the chamber. And we were the fiscal agent and became the lead for the grant because we can more quickly write the grant and do the grant. You have to go through school boards. have to go through. And the health sector partnership is not an entity, so they can’t apply, as you know. So we received funding and hired a subcontractor to work directly with CTE teachers to bring industry to do work-based learning.

Brandon Burton (10:55.938)
Thank

Brandon Burton (11:07.822)
you

Yvonne Myers (11:07.834)
And we’ve gone, they have gone from 40 to over 400 with our help of activities where students are either getting paid and they’re in internships or they’re doing job shadows or informational interviews. And what we find is when we can really hook that industry member and write that plan well of what a student could do in an internship or even in a job shadow, they will take more, right? And they will say, I need two or three.

Brandon Burton (11:34.978)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (11:37.755)
figure out this will be my pipeline for my employees. Some say well I went to Rocky Mountain High School I want to support Rocky Mountain High School I’m doing good work for these students to get exposures and we really push this notion you hear this across the country you know I can’t imagine a job I’ve never heard about right so we really and the we use the Zello platform which is what the school district started with so it’s XELLO

Brandon Burton (11:56.062)
Great.

Yvonne Myers (12:05.698)
And students also make requests. now the grant ended and it’s now a staff member and we found some more funding through our local nonprofits and our county who gave us funds to continue doing this. We find that our staff member has to cold call. Three kids wanted interior design, so she calls the interior designers and she’s got now two wonderful interior designers who regularly take students, them in a great way. These students are

Brandon Burton (12:08.504)
So.

Yvonne Myers (12:34.394)
amplified and say this is what I want to do and off they go into the wide world of you know learning how to be an interior designer. So that’s been highly successful. When the state of Colorado then put out more funds to incentivize business to do this workplace learning, they recognize the cost. I mean the staff member that’s off the floor or out of the position to do that work to develop the plan all those sorts of things. So

We applied and received a half a million dollar grant and we were able to give out 400,000 in incentives and did so in eight months. gave up to $10,000 if you did all the way to an internship. And so we had 150 businesses, we could only fund 48. We really found that this was really, and it didn’t.

Brandon Burton (13:12.194)
Nice, that’s cool.

Yvonne Myers (13:25.252)
There’s not a one-to-one match. Industry isn’t getting fully paid for the work they’re doing. That little donut shop is not, the 2,500 is not gonna cover their costs, even the 10,000. But it’s a recognition that there is a cost, that there is an effort that you have that we recognize that for you. And so we actually received $50,000 in funding this past year from Woodward, one of our larger industries in the area.

Brandon Burton (13:47.886)
you

Yvonne Myers (13:51.109)
who said, well, we want to continue doing that work. have a charitable trust, and they gave us funds. And we have a request in for more funds from them to do this incentive work as well. And that all came out of the sector partnerships wanting to do work-based learning with funding that we got. So it sort of just starts to build on itself as you go.

Brandon Burton (13:59.599)
And that’s awesome.

Brandon Burton (14:07.97)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s very cool. So these business sector partnerships, you know, I imagine for some listening, it may be a new concept. Maybe their chamber doesn’t, you know, take this approach. How do you go about starting a business sector partnership? And do you feel like you have to get all of the businesses in that sector in your region or whatever to be a part of it? Or are there going to be some that abstain from being a part of the partnership? How does that work?

Yvonne Myers (14:37.358)
That’s super. Those are super great questions, Brandon. So when Colorado started it, we used what’s called the Next Gen Sector Partnership model. And they’ve just changed their name to Foundation. So I think you could Google Next Gen Sector Partnership as well. And you do reach out to those who are most influential in that region that are going to bring that

Brandon Burton (14:50.538)
Okay. Yeah.

Brandon Burton (15:03.95)
Makes sense.

Yvonne Myers (15:05.88)
are going to bring others. If you get an invite from that restaurant owner, you’re like, I don’t know what it is, but I better go. So you kind of lean on those. they don’t have to be leaders after that. You kind of not use them, but you activate them for that moment. And so we traditionally always use the Purple Wall model. It’s a Canadian facilitation process. So if you Google Purple Wall facilitation, you will find it.

Brandon Burton (15:12.962)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (15:35.693)
And it’s really just a parachute piece of material that’s purple. And you spray sticky on it, and you put all the industry at a U-shaped table, and you say, what keeps you up at night? And it takes a minute. Someone has to be brave and write the first thing. And with our health care one, one of the hospital administrators wrote, I don’t know how to discharge mentally ill people out of my hospital, and I have no resources. And they’re just sitting there. And so I

Brandon Burton (16:01.046)
that’s huge.

Yvonne Myers (16:03.222)
I lifted that up and read it to all the other people at the U-shaped table and they said, that’s what we’re talking about. And then the cards start flying, right? And you place them together, you know, in cards that match. And pretty soon you have 42 cards that say behavioral health is an opportunity, Workforce is an opportunity. What the last purple wall for the health sector partnership is every couple of years you do it again to be sure you’re on track. For the now for hospitals, it’s safety and security of the staff.

Brandon Burton (16:14.635)
Thank you.

Yvonne Myers (16:33.05)
That is becoming a very big opportunity for a second party to work on. And there’s a bit of a model that says you need a leadership team, you need some bylaws, and you shouldn’t have quarterly meetings and committees, or so. I mean, after that, do what works for you, absolutely. And a lot of times, when we started, I didn’t worry about who came. I just thought, we need to make it.

Brandon Burton (16:34.807)
Okay.

Brandon Burton (16:47.502)
Or do what works for you, right?

Yvonne Myers (16:59.854)
We need to keep moving it forward so people will find out and say, well, I better become a part of that, right? And that we kept it valuable and important. So like the health sector one that I led for eight years as a healthcare employee, we always did a post-legislative recap of what happened. Nobody has time to follow what’s happening in the legislature and know what’s going on. And then sometimes, then they’ve moved to now they have a legislative committee because we have a lot of legislation around healthcare now. So now they’ve moved to a

not a listening after, but a proactive before, right? And that’s again, that evolution of these sector partnerships moving and they want. But for me, they are a confab of the willing, working on what they want to work on. So he who shows up, we work on the things you wanna do, right? And so if it’s not meeting your needs, then you’re not gonna come, or you get a group of people together who say, want to work on this sort of a thing. So yeah, and not everybody has to join.

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Brandon Burton (17:53.603)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (17:57.755)
Keep it going, keep it moving forward, and people will come when they want to.

Brandon Burton (18:01.548)
Yeah. And I imagine in every community, those business sectors are going to look slightly different. I you may have some overlap where healthcare is something important or housing or manufacturing or whatnot, but others, maybe manufacturing is not as big of a factor and you go a different direction.

Yvonne Myers (18:10.595)
Right.

Yvonne Myers (18:18.616)
Very much so. We have one of the only nonprofit sector partnerships in the country because nonprofits, there’s a part where industry also contributes, right? They may pay for all partner meetings. They may, you know, for the construction con, they’re all buying the booths, they’re bringing their equipment. mean, they’re spending cash to do this and nonprofits don’t have as much money. But our nonprofit sector partnership is very active and has figured out how to…

Brandon Burton (18:36.994)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (18:45.156)
to do all of that without pulling money away from the nonprofits themselves. So they’re very active. So you’re right. It’s unique to each community in each region. We found the financial sector partnership when they launched, they’re one that kind of crosses over all the sector partnerships and fiscal literacy or financial literacy has become a topic with everyone because even though wages have gone up, people are still struggling with what things cost and housing and all that.

Brandon Burton (19:00.258)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (19:12.738)
So they’re looking at how they can bring trainings and education to the other sector partnerships. They also highlight the financial sector partnerships. Every all-profit meet and all-partner meeting hosts a nonprofit to share with what they’re doing so these banks and other financial folks can understand what’s happening in the nonprofit world. And so they’ve actually started to cross across each other to support each other as well, which has been fun to watch.

Brandon Burton (19:33.219)
Yeah.

So.

Very cool. Now, I know you guys have gotten into the work with focus with automotive and HVAC industries. You want to tell us about that and how that came to be?

Yvonne Myers (19:47.405)
Yes. Yeah, yeah. So our state did some financial training for those of us that are intermediaries. As the chamber has gotten into workforce, we’re now listed as a workforce intermediary. So we’re a connector between industry and workforce, economic development, all of that. And so, right?

Brandon Burton (20:05.42)
Yeah.

Convino, right?

Yvonne Myers (20:10.606)
And they recognized with all of the ARPA money that had flowed into all of us, post-COVID, that that was going to dry up. That’s once in a lifetime. We hope none of us want to live through another COVID situation. And that what was going to happen after this big infusion of cash, and then things were going to stop. And so they did financial training for us. And in that were folks from the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation and their Talent Pipeline Management Program.

Brandon Burton (20:20.215)
Great.

Yvonne Myers (20:38.682)
And so I started to learn about that program. So I decided to take the course. And so glad that I did, because it really builds on sector partnerships, which is industry-led, but in really the workforce committee. The sector partnerships might work on legislation or labor laws or other things, labor laws, or liquor laws. We have a thing that went on in liquor laws with hospitality. And so.

Brandon Burton (20:57.186)
Good.

Yvonne Myers (21:03.49)
With the talent pipeline management, really is industry coming together and kind of owning what’s happening in that space. And what I mean by that, like with HVAC, when we met with them, we said, what is your greatest need that you have to solve in the next two years? That’s how TPM is. And they said, we need entry-level maintenance technicians. But guess what? With those 10 folks, they titled that title 10 different names.

And that’s a problem, right? So how can I as a CTE teacher, how can I as a parent, how can I as an applicant even figure out what role this is across all of these vendors and providers? Also, we went through an exercise of agreeing to what are all the skills they need to have to be hired and what skills are they going to be taught as they’re moving forward. So they come into alignment with that because then we take that to education and say,

Brandon Burton (21:30.432)
Really? Yeah it is.

Yvonne Myers (21:58.157)
If you can teach these things, we will hire them from you. And maybe there’s 15 things, and my business wants 18 things. Well, those three are mine to teach. These 15 will come from education. And then you survey your education and say, what programs do you have? How many students can you take? So in our region, our HVAC providers, and it’s from Brighton, Colorado, which is a little closer to Denver, up to Laramie, Wyoming, that’s the

Brandon Burton (22:02.52)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (22:26.616)
the geographic area our HVAC members provide, they said we need 250 over the next two years. Well, that number wakes up education, right? If I call as my own little HVAC company and I say I need three people in next two years, they go, well, isn’t that sweet? I’ll send some resumes or, you know, come see our students. You say 250, you move the nation, honestly. And so our local school district here, are

Brandon Burton (22:34.478)
Wow.

Brandon Burton (22:44.898)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (22:54.292)
aging as a state in Colorado and we’re not having as many babies and our schools are you know some places in Colorado are closing schools and our district would like to repurpose them and use them for education of other folks right in the evenings on the weekends adults that kind of thing I’m sure that’s happening across the country as well so the HVAC folks did surveys with educators and community colleges and you know do you need a two-year degree do you know

Brandon Burton (23:09.314)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (23:24.154)
what education do you need? Where can we hire folks and then train them and then put them back into education? How can we look at this differently? The automotive is in the same place. There are a few months behind them. in both cases, like yesterday’s meeting with our automotive, we had our school district here and they’re like, what would it take for you to hire somebody under 18? They’re like, well, we can’t. Well, right.

Brandon Burton (23:49.342)
Why not?

Yvonne Myers (23:53.131)
In healthcare, when I was asked that question, why can’t you hire him under 18? I said, well, it’s a nursing home regulation. Well, it’s not. And I said, it’s an OSHA rule. It’s not. It must be a labor law because we’ve always done it that way, right? It’s not a labor law. I asked our liability insurance provider. He said, yeah, you can’t. And I said, can you show me where that is? Because I needed to tell other people why we couldn’t do it. So give me the piece of paper. And then he came back two weeks later and he said, yeah, I got it.

Brandon Burton (24:03.48)
No.

Brandon Burton (24:16.11)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (24:22.042)
So we started taking students in high school when they finished the med prep program because you want to grab them when they’re ready and you want to get them going and you want to get them in your, you know, in jobs and, and then we’d scholarship them. Then we would pay for their nursing, right? And so same sort of thing in automotive and HVAC. And what I love about it is it, it holds industry accountable to stop stealing from each other and paying another dollar and taking that employee there collectively together.

Brandon Burton (24:47.512)
breath.

Yvonne Myers (24:49.848)
They also are helping develop curriculum. They also are helping to donate supplies. Like they can push on their suppliers and say, hey, so our high school automotive bay is one bay and I guess the lift is bad. I don’t know about lifts, know, but all the automotive people are like, this is terrible. We need to get to four bays and they can use their influence with their suppliers who want students to be hired so that they can supply the supplies. And so

Brandon Burton (25:06.007)
yeah.

Brandon Burton (25:19.182)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (25:19.896)
Here it works. And the magic of it is that industry has had their head down all these years saying, well, they just don’t provide me the right people. Those educators don’t know, get to play and understand the parameters of what education has to work under and the limitations they might have or the issues they might have. The educators who say, well, these industry people never hire the right people, they get to hear on the other side. And then we collectively come together and try to solve that problem.

Brandon Burton (25:46.742)
Right.

Yvonne Myers (25:47.567)
You know, it’s a long journey, right? We’re not going to get to 250 students. But three to five years, we should look back. And the idea is now we’ve done maintenance technician for both HVAC and automotive. Now what’s the next step? And what’s the next step? So the last part I’ll say is that for automotive, the greatest need they have are master mechanics. And that takes 10 years. You have to have enough pipeline coming in to get enough people to go that decade to get to be your master mechanic, right? And that’s what we’re doing.

Brandon Burton (26:01.518)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (26:16.686)
Yeah. And really with both of those industries, HVAC and automotive, I mean, with the rise of AI, those are going to be jobs that are around for a while still while a lot of white collar jobs are going by the wayside with AI.

Yvonne Myers (26:17.476)
create here.

Yvonne Myers (26:31.702)
are going away. And yesterday we had our Larimer County Workforce Center staff member with our automotive meeting and he said, and I had never heard this before, but that a lot of AI jobs are filled by women, jobs that AI may take away, and that this would be a new place, a new market to get, have women that can come into HVAC and automotive. And most of the people in our area anyway that are managing, owning, running these businesses

Brandon Burton (26:51.534)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (27:00.362)
all came out of like VOTEC programs. They had automotive in middle school, right? And those programs are gone and they’re coming back, but they need to come back with industry supporting them and getting the right equipment. can share an interesting story. One of our community colleges here had a tour with all the automotive folks and they said, and over here’s our showers, because we know you all have showers, so we wanna mimic that, we wanna teach them how it’s all gonna be. And…

Brandon Burton (27:05.454)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (27:16.942)
for the AI on the of this unit.

Brandon Burton (27:24.472)
Thanks.

Yvonne Myers (27:26.914)
I looked around and all the automotive people had such funny looks on their faces. And so when we got back to the main room, I said, I want to go back to that shower. You all had such funny looks on your faces. And they said, not a one of them has showers, not a one. And so there must have been some automotive person someplace that said we had a shower and then education thinks they need to provide that. And think of the cost of putting in the showers and having the showers and talking about the showers. That’s not what we need. We might have needed.

Brandon Burton (27:41.077)
Wow.

Brandon Burton (27:48.162)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (27:53.989)
three more car bays or an electric car bay or something different than that. And so I’m super excited and to watch the aha moments. So yesterday they said to the school district, well, if you have 18 students and they’ve gone through semester one and semester two and they have their ASE certification, how do we get those kids? You could just like, wow, 18 kids, you know? And she said, well, have this, do you do a career fair? And I said to them, when you’re in this talent pipeline management,

collaborative and you’re coming to meetings and you’re donating equipment and maybe even giving scholarship funds. You you pay or do what you want, but you have opportunities to play more because you know what the need is. You have first bid on those students right like you are helping to create the pipeline and it was like. What like crazy town and the other part is that industry, whether it’s HVAC or automotive, we’ve heard this a lot honestly feel like.

The students that come out of the schools are the ones who everyone said, well, Timmy and Sally, they’re not going to make it. So we’ll just stick them in automotive or HVAC. And that is right. And that really isn’t true. And with the advent of computers and the technology around automotive and even HVAC, I you have to plug in with your phone and understand the error messages and all the things. These are becoming highly technical positions.

Brandon Burton (29:02.798)
Right, yeah. Kind of a negative connotation, right?

Yvonne Myers (29:21.294)
They want all of the levels of students to come to them. And with HVAC, we’ve learned there’s 49,000 openings right now in the country for HVAC across the country. And these call centers and all these other places that have to be cooled and heated and all of that. And they say if you get HVAC trained, you can work anywhere in the world. And so kids are starting to hear that, parents.

Brandon Burton (29:45.858)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (29:50.359)
It’s very interesting, exciting stuff. And these were folks that sort of just popped up because the chamber hears and listens and sees what’s going on and has those industries with us. It wasn’t like we have this big data. We had all these automotive people saying we cannot find people we can’t get. And then HVAC, because it doesn’t have a union, which is maybe good or bad, I don’t really know. But because of that, they’re kind of.

Brandon Burton (30:02.638)
Makes those connections. Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (30:16.118)
out there a little bit and because it involves some electrical and some plumbing and a little bit of sheet metal they kind of fall in this no place and I’m super excited to help bring them together with a voice.

Brandon Burton (30:28.45)
Yeah, that’s fantastic. It’s exciting work that you guys are involved with with these partnerships. And yeah, it’s awesome. Well, as we begin to wrap things up, wanted to ask you, for those listening who want to take their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you leave for them as they try to work towards that?

Yvonne Myers (30:33.119)
well, thank you. Yeah, it’s fun every day. So.

Yvonne Myers (30:51.212)
Yeah, yeah, I do think that I feel very strongly, obviously, I’ve said a little bit earlier in this podcast, but that the chamber is a natural place to be leading this work, because it’s industry that needs to lead it. Education is mandated and is there and government and workforce and all those things are there. And, you know, we’re unabashed at saying industry would never do that. That’s not how you would meet with industry. This is how you would do it.

And our state is really flipping that script because many of our chambers are playing in that space. Our VATA chamber, Boulder, Grand Junction are really also, we’re all collectively in this space. And so I think you’re remiss if you’re not playing in that space, even being at the meetings. You may not have to be leading a TPM, but lifting up that voice and then bringing your chamber members to that.

Brandon Burton (31:35.95)
Thank

Brandon Burton (31:39.849)
Thank

Yvonne Myers (31:43.175)
Because the way the workforce system has worked for a long time isn’t going to continue working the right way if we’re not at that table. So I think that’s a really big deal. Don’t undersell yourself. you are vitally important in the workforce space if you’ve never stepped into it. You really, really are. And it doesn’t take much for you to get going. So don’t be afraid. Call me. I’ll help you.

Brandon Burton (31:48.44)
Right.

Brandon Burton (32:05.932)
Yeah, that’s great. I’d love that. I like asking everyone I have on the show about the future of chambers and how you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward.

Yvonne Myers (32:17.21)
Yeah, know, next month I’ll celebrate five years here, but as you stated in my bio, you know, I was on the board for 14. And when I took over the marketing position at our company, not running an assisted living anymore, I thought, well, I don’t know if I can do this. The owner said, you have to go, you better go to the chamber. And I thought, well, what is that? So I went and it was Rolodex days way before the computers. And so I went from one Rolodex to two and I became someone at our company that, do you know somebody here?

Brandon Burton (32:36.685)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (32:46.626)
I do, and if not, know somebody who knows somebody here. so chambers are, to me, have to always be here. The collection of how industry comes together, has their voice, advocacy for business, that voice of business. But also, it’s a journey for a business. I come as a new, I just start, opened up my business. So this is how I learn how to market and how to, where SBDC is, where all the resources are to start my business. And then,

Brandon Burton (32:59.118)
Bye.

Yvonne Myers (33:13.752)
I get successful in my business and I start taking on internships or I start, you know, donating back to the community. And then I’m far enough along that I join your board and I’m making impact and decisions about all of that. And even past board members are still very connected to us and call us with ideas and suggestions and all those sorts of things. And I think the future of Chambers is even more important because of the importance of business and how we

Brandon Burton (33:25.432)
Thank you.

Yvonne Myers (33:42.735)
drive the economy, what a big say we have and what happens in our economy. But we also recognize the importance of government and nonprofits and all the other components. But without us, none of that works. And so I feel like chambers are going to maintain their importance and coming together to collectively work on things and not being in silos. And I’m not saying that chambers are, but sometimes in a region, we have 19 chambers in our region. And we do a couple of things.

Brandon Burton (33:53.1)
Yeah.

Yvonne Myers (34:12.334)
together every year. And that’s important to continue doing and lean on each other and work together. But I feel like chambers, the value of chambers will not go away. It hasn’t gone away since the 1800s and will still continue to be vitally important. And we need to be sure that we’re raising the funds and being in the front seat of convening, championing, and connecting people and continuing to do that work.

Brandon Burton (34:36.94)
Yeah. Yeah. That touches back on your original comment you made when we started this about the R &D within Chambers and just do that ripoff and duplicate and see what works in another community. And if it can work in your community, give it a shot. No shame.

Yvonne Myers (34:53.434)
Absolutely, absolutely. I have never not, I mean, I’ve reached out across the country and I have never not had anyone say, absolutely, here’s all my resources. Then two days later, I found some more videos for it. Here’s some more resources for you. And I just love the camaraderie. I just love the connection to how important industry is and entrepreneurism is and moving the economy forward. So it’s an honor to be here.

Brandon Burton (35:04.429)
Right?

Brandon Burton (35:17.876)
Absolutely. But in that vein, 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 about all these exciting things you’ve covered today.

Yvonne Myers (35:27.982)
Sure, yeah, for sure. So I’m at the Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce. You can always Google that and we, you my picture’s there and all my contact information for sure. My email is the letter Y as in Yvonne Myers, M-Y-E-R-S at F-C as in Fort Collins Chamber dot org (ymyers@fcchamber.org). Our phone number is there as well. My cell phone number is on our website. So feel free to reach out at any point or at any time.

Brandon Burton (35:54.87)
That’s perfect. I’ll have all that linked in our show notes for this episode to make it easy. But Yvonne, this has been great having you on. And you guys are doing great work there in Fort Collins. And keep it up. And thank you for sharing some of that great work with us today.

Yvonne Myers (36:06.126)
Well, thank you.

Yvonne Myers (36:09.944)
Well, thank you for asking me to participate. I’m honored.

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Foundation-Driven Disaster Relief with David Jackson

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Brandon Burton (00:00.465)
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. Today’s guest is a dynamic community leader and voice of the high country. David Jackson is the President and CEO of the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. Since stepping into his role in 2016,

David has transformed the chamber into a powerhouse of regional engagement and innovation. Under his leadership, the chamber launched its own foundation, expanded to over 700 active members, and was recently honored as the 2025 Carolina’s Outstanding Chamber of the Year by CACCE.

David’s work has earned him multiple accolades, including being named Community Advocate of the Year by the North Carolina Rural Center and the North Carolina Main Street Champion. In 2025 alone, he was recognized with the Town of Boone 1872 Award and the Community Inspiration Award from the Watauga Community Foundation. Appalachian State alum and longtime resident of Boone, David has deep roots in the region.

He’s served on the boards ranging from Applecart, I hope I said that right, to the town of Boone Central Resource Development, and even teaches as adjunct professor in the Walker College of Business. David, 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.

David Jackson (01:40.578)
Yeah. Well, hello friends. I feel like this might be the most niche podcast I think I’ve ever been on. so that’s, that’s exciting. I know I’m talking to people that get it, as, a listener myself, this is, it’s going to be fun. my interesting fact, I was prior to chamber, life, for 16 years was the radio play-by-play announcer at Appalachian state university, for football, basketball, baseball.

I was around for the App State Michigan upset back in 2007. Occasionally you might still hear that play call get thrown out there and I’m the one that’s screaming the softest trying to make sense of what’s going on. My broadcast partner was saying something to the effect of yard sale in the big house during that moment, but I enjoyed long career as a sports broadcaster. I still do some of that work. I do ESPN plus broadcast for App State now as well as.

Brandon Burton (02:14.567)
That’s right.

David Jackson (02:34.956)
Some work with the Carolina Panthers on occasion, just, you know, it’s a hobby rather than a lifestyle. And I found that working in college athletics for as long as I did, there are so many parallels to that work and chamber work. It wasn’t what I was expecting, but it took me about 20 minutes to get into this job and think, this is the same gig. It’s just new people and maybe a little bit less crazy hours.

Brandon Burton (03:00.507)
That would have been a really cool episode for us to go down that rabbit hole. Those comparisons. Yeah. I thought I recognized your voice. Yeah, you’ve got a voice perfect for being on a podcast. So this is fantastic. Well, tell us a little bit about the Boone County Chamber just to give us an idea of the size staff, the type of work you guys are involved with, budget, that sort of thing to set the stage.

David Jackson (03:04.287)
Yeah, there you go. It’s a fascinating comparison, it really is.

David Jackson (03:28.194)
Yeah. Yeah. So, so first off, the Boone area chambers in Boone, North Carolina, we are one of four that we can count chambers that have some reference to Daniel Boone in the name. We get a lot of calls and occasionally some mail for the Boone, Iowa chamber and have developed quite a relationship with them over the years. But Boone, North Carolina is in the Northwest corner of North Carolina, about an hour and 45 minutes, Northwest of Charlotte.

So if you’re looking at a map and you see where North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee all converge up there in the Northwest mountains, that’s where Boone is located. We’ve got a population here of right around 20,000 inside the town, about 60,000 inside the county. And as I mentioned, we’re home to Appalachian State University. They’ve got about 19,000 students here in the area locally, but an enrollment of a little over 22,000 now with a lot of online and graduate programs.

spread really throughout western North Carolina. They’ve got a campus in Hickory, which is about an hour south of here that has recently emerged as well. So this is a very tourism heavy area. It is one that in the wintertime as we record today, we’ve got something frozen falling from the sky and that coincides with really opening weekend for the ski industry here.

in North Carolina. Skiing brings in about $125 million a year to the state’s economy and all of that is really located within a two county area here. In the summertime, we run about 10 degrees to 15 degrees cooler than Raleigh and Charlotte. So we are a tourism Mecca from that perspective. And if it gets up to about 84, 85 degrees in July, people are melting in the streets up here. So.

Tourism heavy economy, about 3,500 feet in elevation for the most part in the county. This is a special place. A lot of folks that live here have the university as a magnet of some sort. It either brought them here, it brought them back here, or maybe was the reason why they wanted to stay around as a local because they’ve been able to get educated and find life here. it makes our…

David Jackson (05:38.934)
mix of businesses, very unique. Again, a lot of service industry, but then a lot of innovation tied to the university as well and the community college system here in North Carolina. So no dull moment, like for many of you that are listening, but certainly a part of the state that is unique and we try to play into that as much as we can.

Brandon Burton (05:57.18)
Yeah, I’m always fascinated with college and university towns where your population fluctuates depending on enrollment and the time of year and whatnot. But it’s its own unique circumstance to try to manage.

David Jackson (06:11.214)
Yeah. And, and, you know, football game days are a big part of the economic driver here. Uh, you know, app state in the good years, uh, they, will miss a bowl for the second time in as many years. And that’s kind of unheard of around here, but, but for a normal game day, they can push up a past 35, almost 40,000 attendees. Kid Brewer’s stadium is one of the highest ranked stadiums in the country for a percent capacity. They usually go well over a hundred percent. think last year they were at 107 % of their capacity.

So, you you pretty much triple the size of the town when they come in and bring all the ancillary fund to that. And those are the six dates that people block off and schedule life around and businesses do the same. know, so those, when the schedule’s released in March, everybody scribbles furiously and then we try to plan everything else around that. But it’s a very big part of the university’s influence here.

Brandon Burton (07:03.631)
Yeah, I can imagine. Man, I’m thinking we should have chosen a different topic, but what we did settle on was to talk about disaster relief and specifically how you guys were able to utilize your foundation to help with disaster relief after Hurricane Helene. So we’ll dive into the details of that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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David Jackson (07:23.661)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (07:26.983)
All right, David, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about disaster relief and how you guys were able to utilize your foundation as a tool to help in that effort. Why don’t you set the stage for us, give us the background and how the foundation came to be and then how you went to implement it.

David Jackson (07:43.238)
Yeah. So first I want to say thank you to a number of chamber colleagues that reached out to our community and communities throughout Western North Carolina during what was an incredibly difficult time for us in September and early October of 2024. As I mentioned at the top, this is a very tourism heavy economy throughout the Western side of the state. Basically from I-77 West, are

the Mecca of the state’s tourism attention for the fall. Because of the leaves and because of the scenic views that you get, you look out over a 45, 50 mile range view at fall color, you can’t beat this location. To have Hurricane Helene’s impact right at the front end of that part of the calendar was catastrophic for us economically. And that’s not just here. Obviously a lot of lenses were focused on the Asheville area. Asheville’s about an hour and 15 minutes to the southwest of here.

And our communities are incredibly interconnected. And one of the ribbons that ties us all together is the Blue Ridge Parkway, which is the most visited national park in the country, stretching from Southern Virginia all the way down past Asheville. That road was decimated by the storm. And in a normal October, you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of visitors that are driving up and down that road and venturing into the small and large communities off the parkway.

on any given day. we saw what was our top month for economic performance get turned off before it ever got turned on and turned completely off. So we had a lot of colleagues reach out and help those that have been through disasters before. We talked to colleagues in Hawaii and Iowa, Florida, Louisiana, all over the country really, that helped us understand what was next in the FEMA process, the SBA process.

We learned very quickly never to schedule your natural disaster in the midst of a contentious presidential election. That was all kinds of bad for all of the reasons you would imagine. Yeah, and we are still going through some of that reorganization of FEMA dynamic and what that meant for trust in our community. This is an area of the state and really of the country that is deep rooted in Appalachia culture. So it takes a lot of time to trust people. And when you’ve got

Brandon Burton (09:42.715)
Make a note of that, yeah.

David Jackson (10:02.712)
people wearing federal jackets and badges running into your community after it’s been turned upside down. That’s not exactly the warm, friendly, hospitality-based response that we normally have. And it’s taken some time to get to that. So I set all that context to say that what we learned in our unique situation is just how much local partners and trusted partners matter. We, back at the beginning of 2022,

We signed a contract with Watauga County to provide economic development administrative assistance for the Watauga County EDC. So we are essentially the backbone of economic development for our county. The previous economic development director had retired from the county. We hired him here at the chamber for his kind of post-government life. And he maintains that same role now, just working for us instead of them.

So at that time, we decided that we needed to start a 501c3 foundation to do the economic development sidecar work. So if we’re going to go buy land or support a project, we need a place to raise those funds. Very similar to every other chamber in America, it seems like. We were one of the last to the party in that regard, but had a lot of help in setting that up. So when the storm hit, our director of communications and I were sitting at a coffee table inside

Appalachian State Student Union. We had no power or internet access at the office and Appalachian State happened to have both because of their robust system and a little bit of self-sustaining ability there. So we’re sitting outside the coffee shop and my director of communications looks at me and says, do you think our foundation might be helpful right now? And we’re less than 24 hours away from the impact of the storm. We’re trying to figure out where everybody on the staff is, let alone what our response is gonna be.

and said, you know, it’s not really what it’s designed for, but yeah, I mean, we know we’re gonna have to raise money for something. We don’t know what that something is yet, but yeah, let’s give it a shot and make it available. Just happened to have a Watauga County commissioner walking by who works at App State. And I said to him, said, Charlie, I think we’re gonna use our foundation as a landing space for funds. And he said, yeah, man, that could get money. I don’t know. Good luck with it. And that was that.

David Jackson (12:22.958)
So we put out on social media, because again, we had internet access, that if people wanted to donate to local causes to support the business community, here was a place to do it. And here was a mechanism for it, got a QR code and got Stripe working. And all of the sudden, before we knew what happened, in about seven days, we had $200,000, a little more than that, that had been raised in five and $10 increments for people all over the world. People that had a heartfelt connection.

to the mountains of North Carolina for whatever that reason happened to be. They may have learned to ski here, went to school here, whatever. They wanted to give back. So we, since then, in total, we’re knocking on the door of about $2 million that we’ve raised since September of 2024 in just hurricane-related disaster funding. We’ve used, and we can talk here in a minute about the variety of ways we’ve deployed that, but I think that…

The lesson learned here is that for all of us, people have a connection to our communities that maybe we feel like we understand, but we don’t necessarily understand it as deeply if we are in the community. What I mean by that is the people that would desire to live next door to you, they want to be back in the place they went to school or that place that’s special to them, they have connections and again, that heartstring pull that we can’t imagine living in that place every day.

It’s that yearning desire to be there and help. And that saved us because it took weeks to get any kind of major substantive funding out of the federal government, from the state government. Those dollars were slow to come. Once they did come, none of them were there for small business support. I think that’s something that we’ve heard echoed around the country. There are no small business grants that are coming from the government to help those businesses that again saw

significant turnoff of their revenues at the busiest month of the year, right? So there was hurting that was going on there and nobody else was coming to help. So that’s kind of one of the lanes that we moved into and we were just heartened and it gave us some pep in our step after some incredibly long days, some that are still going on as a matter of fact, that people care. And that was really the adrenaline that kept us going there for a while.

Brandon Burton (14:40.529)
Right.

Brandon Burton (14:45.019)
Yeah, so questions are coming to my mind. I’m sure they are to listeners as well. So a lot of those listening have gone through the process of establishing a foundation or maybe they’re considering it or maybe they came into their position and was already set up. But when you guys set up your foundation, as far as the documents and everything, your, the charter and whatnot, so what…

David Jackson (14:48.461)
Yes.

Brandon Burton (15:09.908)
How was it set up that allowed you to deploy the funds for disaster relief? Usually it’s very specific what the funds are for, right?

David Jackson (15:14.454)
Yeah, yeah, and that’s a great question. So we set the foundation up to be very vague in economic development support. The reason for that was that we didn’t exactly know at the time that we created it where those levers would ultimately be pulled. If that was going to be, say, in housing support, you know, like everybody, we have affordable housing issues here and we wanted flexibility to be able to maybe buy land.

or donate money to a specific project that we could fundraise. So we didn’t want to go, and some foundations are so incredibly specific, we did want to give some flexibility to work within five core buckets. So like many communities, would imagine housing is one, childcare is another one, workforce development. We have a bucket for our chamber capital needs here to support our business.

And then we’ve got another general fund that allows us to support community events, run our leadership program, things along those lines. So we tried to establish it like that first. The key that came around on the disaster side was that word disaster. And as we raised funds and put them in that general account for community support, we were able to then deploy those funds. Part of that went to childcare. We can talk about that in a minute, but.

the disaster grant program that we’ve run. We’ve run four rounds of a disaster grant program for small businesses over a three county area here, not just Watauga, but Ash and Avery counties as well that border us. And by using the word disaster, you get away from some of the IRS issues there. Those businesses that receive grant money still have to report that, you know, it’s income for them, but it’s cashflow as much as anything.

we were able to put about $1.4 million of the money that we raised into that specific program itself. And then had businesses apply to us over four rounds. Each round had a different flavor to it. And we were able to deploy those grants in the name of the disaster itself. As long as we were a disaster declared county.

David Jackson (17:31.15)
Our accountant said that was the way to handle the language and the flexibility of that community support mechanism was really what helped drive the vast majority of what we’ve done.

Brandon Burton (17:41.349)
Yeah. So that leads to my next question. I was going to ask about how the money has been deployed. so you touched on one aspect of it there. Is there other areas, other ways that those funds have been dispersed?

David Jackson (17:46.776)
Mm-hmm.

David Jackson (17:53.486)
Yeah, so one of the early conversations that we had with our foundation board, you we gathered them about 10 days after the storm. We had money coming in, you know, we had about, you know, $250,000 at the time. So it was, was a good bit of money, more money than we’d ever seen, but also in the totality of, you know, a couple billion dollar storm, not going to move the needle in any one direction very far. So we, we said to them, you know,

We’ve got this money, we need to get it out. What do you want to do? Here are some options. We talked about business grants then, and to give you an idea, the storm hits in late September. This is probably the second full week of October we had this conversation. And so we felt like business grants was going to come. were holding out hope that some conversations around the General Assembly in North Carolina, the governor’s office, Roy Cooper at the time, now Josh Stein, that there were going to be some…

mechanisms far greater than ours that were going to come into play, which never did. But we would hold tight there. And one of our board members said, you know, we ought to be about what we’re about. And we’re about childcare support. We believe very firmly and are one of the state’s leaders in this thought that childcare is an economic development issue. It’s our core economic development issue, access and affordability and the ability for

to support the workforce that supports the workforce. So we said, you know, we knew at that time we had 36 centers, licensed care centers here in Watauga County. All of them were dealing with enrollment issues related to the storm. School system was closed here for about three and a half, four weeks, just in Watauga County. It was longer in surrounding areas. And because of that, people weren’t working. There was fluctuation in need for childcare. There was certainly a lot of cost issues.

across everything that made the expensive childcare bill at the end of the month almost insurmountable. So we said, let’s take about $210,000 of this money and let’s invest it in those childcare centers and let’s make sure that they can be open in November. But we saw that investment as a twofold thing where one, we could stabilize the industry and North Carolina has got a litany of issues with its childcare support mechanisms statewide. That’s another whole episode we could get into.

David Jackson (20:16.237)
But we wanted to make sure those businesses could open again, know, full force when they needed to and that their workforce was supported. But we also thought if we could provide some tuition assistance here, we’re going to free up cash for people that are going through the process with insurance, going through the process with FEMA, and it’s going to take a while for them to get money and they need to make repairs. know, we’re talking bridges washed out, roadways washed out, a lot of those private and nestled into little nooks and crannies in the mountains.

It’s not easy to repair necessarily and certainly costly. So any money that we could free up for immediate needs, we felt like that was going to be a benefit. So we made an allocation to our local Smart Start agency of $210,000 to support tuition for October for everybody that was in a licensed childcare center. They were able to pull some additional money to work that grant off of another grant. And we ended up deploying just shy of $240,000 to that effort.

which nearly covered every student that was in licensed childcare here in the county. We had a few centers that opted out because they had other funding that backed that up so they didn’t want to take money away so we could spread it farther. And we were able to provide that tuition assistance for that first month. And that was a life changer for not only the centers, but the families. And that really got us started. Then we were, because of that success, I think people saw our foundation as a trusted destination for funding. The vast majority of what we got,

In that 1.4, I was talking about earlier, were locally driven funds. We’ve had three allocations from two different large grantors that totaled up about $750,000. So about half of that came from the private sector. And again, small gifts. There was a house party at App State that donated a couple hundred bucks to us from their proceeds. it really got crazy there. But I think part of that was also telling the story of how we were spending the money.

not wanting to toot our horn by any stretch, especially at that time. But I think if you don’t tell the story, people don’t understand what your capacity is. And we wanted to let people know, like we said, if your dollars come here, we’re gonna keep them local and we’re gonna keep them going toward community function. And that childcare allocation was the thing that kickstarted the whole process.

Brandon Burton (22:33.02)
Right.

So you had mentioned that the foundation is fairly new as the storms coming and you saw an opportunity to be able to utilize it in this way. Had you guys raised any funds for the foundation ahead of time? there, I guess, how have you proactively gone about, obviously after a storm happens, after there’s a catastrophe, it’s easier to broadcast that and get people to donate. But for those listening who want to be proactive ahead of time, who maybe already have a foundation,

trying to collect funds and be a magnet so then when it is needed to be deployed, it’s there and ready whether economic development or disaster relief or whatever the need may be. What was your guys’ situation like?

David Jackson (23:19.499)
Yeah, that’s another great question. know, thinking back a little bit, yeah, first off, I wish we had this foundation longer. You know, knowing what we know now, there are so many uses for something like that. And every community’s got their need and their specific set of needs. Prior to the storm, we raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000 total.

in the history of the foundation for things outside of childcare. Now in the childcare space, we had been involved and part of the reason why this was the thing that we chose for about an eight year period of time. Now we’ve been involved in a deeper community conversation around that childcare industry support. years ago, before the economic development machine here in Watauga County had a destination for funds, our smart start agency held what was called the

Early Childhood Education and Development Fund. And that was an area for us to take public sector dollars and private sector dollars and merge them into an account where we could pay for various workforce supports within the industry. Once we got our foundation started, the county commissioners actually suggested that we take that fund out of the Smart Start Agency and put it into the Economic Development Support Agency because it was just a little bit cleaner and would eliminate any…

impropriety or thought of that with mission drift of the smart start agency. So it was done to really kind of protect them in a way, but also give us the opportunity to then, because it’s in under economic development, allow other people to see that that wouldn’t maybe necessarily see that fund if it were embedded inside of a smart start agency. So with that, we did end up getting some extra traffic there, but you’re talking about $60,000 a year, you know, with some private donations here and there.

You know, so we were, we were in the, the chump change category, really kind of limping along so much so that we had a part-time staff member that we onboarded in August of 2024, and said, all right, part-time staff member, we’re going to limp along here. We’re going to bring you on for 10 hours a week. We’re going to turn that into 20 hours a week by the time the year starts. And then hopefully by next summer, we’ve got you as a full-time member that’s out there working, trying to grow this foundation. Well, you know, the storm hits and he was full-time by the end of the year.

David Jackson (25:41.422)
Uh, and, continues to be just a tremendous asset for us in all of the grant management and the, the, the amount of paperwork that we had to turn around at the end of 2024, all the 10 99s we had to let fly because of the grants. was a great problem to have, but that was a financial burden on us too. You know, so we, really had to think about on the backside of all of this good, you know, it was, it’s also crippling our staff that was worn slap out at the same time, you know, so.

We’ve gotten smarter with that now. And I feel like if we’re ever pressed into that emergency position again, we’ve got an understanding of what emergency dynamics when it’s related to fundraising look like and how we need to be prepared as an organization. And that, unfortunately, I don’t know that you can really prepare for until you do it.

Brandon Burton (26:31.975)
Great, great perspective. So I always like asking the question, especially for those listening who are trying to take their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item would you share with them, whether it’s related to this topic with disaster relief and foundations or something totally different, what would you suggest for them in trying to accomplish that goal of taking their chamber to next level?

David Jackson (26:57.589)
Yeah, you know, when you sent me questions ahead of time, this is the one I stood on the most. I think that it’s kind of twofold. know, certainly when, when I’ve been at this chamber for almost 10 years now, and, know, this is a small tight knit community here in the mountains of Northwest North Carolina, right? So relationships are everything. And it’s proving that you can do what you say you’re going to do.

that allows you to get in the next room and to be a part of the next project. you know, coming to this role from a very different role in the same community, I had to earn that level of respect personally that I wasn’t just the radio broadcaster from App anymore. I had some understanding of what this job was about. And then we built a team that could meet the moment in a variety of different ways, all again centered hardcore on relationship equity.

You know, we’ve got a professional staff here, many of them that were App State grads that have those deep community ties. So when something like Helene happens, you’ve got faces that you know, you’ve got people that you trust and you’ve got a track record behind you that will allow you to be at the epicenter of things. know, that Saturday after the storm hit Friday, we were called to a meeting at the courthouse, sheriff, police chief, you know, all the emergency response folks, and we raised our hand.

And we said, tell us how we can help, you know, put us to work. And our track record in previous smaller situations, led the director to say, all right, you guys are in charge of supply chain distribution, which that’s a whole other episode to talk about why you might not necessarily want to get into that business. But, but we had a member with a warehouse and that, it was a pickleball court, actually an indoor pickleball facility that turned into the supply depot. But that was a relationship with that member that, that.

Brandon Burton (28:49.255)
Perfect.

David Jackson (28:54.985)
allowed us to perform in the moment for in a relationship setting that the county needed a resource. And to be able to provide that means that you need those relationships to really be forged on the sunny days. know, every opportunity that you’ve got to make an impact and again, sign up for something that you can know that you can accomplish and do it well for your community that’s gonna make them lean on you. Now the downside to that is when you’ve got that track record, they’re gonna lean on you.

But I think we all want to be in that moment, right? Because we’re all about community support. We’re all about getting our community over whatever that hurdle is. So we had a front row seat to disaster response. It wasn’t something that I ever thought that we would be in position for at that level, but man, I’m glad we went through it because we were able to help our community directly. We showcased some members and their ability to help their community. And I think got some people thinking differently about business here.

certainly got people thinking differently about Appalachian state. They were tremendously helpful with space, time, effort, energy, volunteers, internet, showers, all that kind of stuff. The town gown relationship has been rocky here in the past. It is as good as it’s ever been. And we have been in a position to tell that story from the inside. And I think that’s helped everybody. So just some thoughts, relationships matter much more so than the bumper sticker than we all have on our cars.

Brandon Burton (30:19.993)
Yeah, I love that idea of forging those relationships before, you know, during the sunny days so you can call on them when you need them. So that’s awesome. As we look to the future of Chambers of Commerce, how do you see the future of Chambers and their purpose going forward?

David Jackson (30:26.657)
Yeah, that’s right.

David Jackson (30:37.523)
Yeah, that’s another great question that, that I feel like it’s things like this that, that are going to be as important as, as you know, membership, and, the, the non dues revenue cycles that we all get chased into, because I think members see that reaction. Excuse me. I think that a lot of times our, our work trying to sell our value is really about what we do. It’s not about what we say we do. And when people see an organization like a chamber.

or an economic development organization leading to try to solve the problem rather than trying to sell themselves on being an answer to the problem. The membership takes care of itself. I don’t necessarily see membership eroding necessarily. I think the motivations for membership change. I think people will want to invest at a time where ROI is certainly at a critical point for anybody that’s in a membership related field.

I think that the work you do is going to drive the investment that people see in you. If they see you as a solutions-based problem solver, that’s going to take care of itself. But then what do you do with your organization to make sure that it is always geared toward community support and making the community better tomorrow than it was today? And for some communities, that is to be the party starter, the parade organizer, the fun.

energetic beacon of light inside, know, difficult conversations sometimes. For others, it’s about leading forward with economic development thoughts and all of those types of things. For us right now, that’s going to be about rebuild. You know, this is going to be a multi-year conversation here, thinking about how you take hundreds of millions of dollars that are going to come in and infrastructure support and make sure that your community is better forward. So we’re hosting those meetings. We want to try to be

a part of that, not drive it. We don’t want to own it, but we want to facilitate. And then, you know, we can storytell a little bit. So I think it all boils back down to being nimble, relationships, and understanding that people will trust what you do when they see you do it. And that will take care of the investment that we all need them to make in us. And we hope that they make positively and see the results based on what we can all do for our communities.

Brandon Burton (32:58.565)
Yeah, I love that.

Make the impact, don’t just talk about the impact that you are talking about making. Actually put the rubber to the road and make something happen. So I love that. Well, David, this has been a great conversation. Hopefully it’s one that kind of gets the wheels turning for those that are listening, thinking about what can they do to be better prepared for when disaster comes to their community or hopefully it doesn’t, but you wanna be prepared for it. I wanted to give you an opportunity to share

David Jackson (33:04.045)
Right.

That’s right.

Brandon Burton (33:30.665)
share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and learn more about the structure of foundation, how you guys have deployed things, or anything else you’ve touched on. What would be the best way for them to reach out and connect?

David Jackson (33:38.529)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. And thank you as well. I’ve listened to so many of these. heard one of our colleagues, Tanya Stevenson on a few weeks ago and that was awesome. Tanya is great. She’s two counties away from me. But yeah, boonchamber.com is our website. We’ve got a podcast as well called Mind Your Business. I encourage you to check that out, learn a little bit about our little pocket of North Carolina.

Brandon Burton (33:49.006)
yeah.

David Jackson (34:04.417)
But in all seriousness, because so many people paid it forward to us, if there is any community in any shape, in any part of this country that is going through something similar to what we experienced, please call us. If for no other reason than to talk to some people that understand and can give you that 10 minutes of levity where you can just let it all out and you may not need anything, you just may need to talk to somebody that’s been through it. So we can help there. We certainly have…

some fresh perspective on what today’s FEMA SBA mechanism looks like and can share some thoughts there. But really we just want to help because so many people helped us, lean on us anytime. BooneChamber.com, come and find us.

Brandon Burton (34:46.437)
That’s perfect. We’ll have it linked in our show notes as well to make it easy. David, this has been great. I hope you feel like you’ve been able to touch on the main points you wanted to cover in this conversation today. But thank you for joining us here on Chamber Chat Podcast for sharing your experience and things that you’ve learned through this process. I think it’s incredibly valuable. Thank you.

David Jackson (35:08.333)
Well, thank you very much for having me.

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Attract, Don’t Recruit with Christine Cribb

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Brandon Burton (00:00.536)
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. Our guest for this episode is Christine Cribb. And after a decade in the Chamber world, where she led the largest Chamber per capita in the entire state of Washington, Christine brought her signature spark and unstoppable energy to the Chamber to a chamber in the foothills of North Carolina. Last year, she made a bold move and stepped away from an industry she deeply loves and stepped into what’s next. Christine went back to school to earn her executive presence certification from Cornell University, launched her own boutique PR and strategy firm, Christine Cribb and Company, and poured her heart and experience into writing her powerful first book, Attract, Don’t Recruit, A fresh relationship driven roadmap for chambers and nonprofits who want to grow with purpose and energy. These days, she’s all about living fully and leading boldly by helping organizations connect with passion while soaking up every moment with her three amazing grandbabies. Christine brings energy, authenticity, and heart to every stage, every project, and every conversation. Get ready because Christine shows up with energy and

The room shifts when she arrives. So Christine, I’m happy to have you with us again here on Chamber Chat podcast. For those who are regular listeners, she was with us in episode 270 if you wanted to go back and listen to that. go ahead and say hello to all the Chamber Champions out there listening. And I always like to get the interesting fact about you.

Christine Cribb (01:44.143)
Hello Chamber Champions. and an interesting fact. Wonderful. Hello Chamber Champions. It’s such a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much, Brandon, for allowing me to come back on. An interesting fact about me would probably be that I spent 2020 during COVID in Italy. And I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me because I drink lots of wine.

I learned how to cook authentically and it was probably the best adult timeout I had ever had. So there’s an interesting fact about me.

Brandon Burton (02:23.054)
of good food that I haven’t been there but I’m a fan of Italian food so how long were you there in 2020?

Christine Cribb (02:30.988)
I was there for an entire year. we were there when January, when it closed down in February. And then when the airports opened back up, I came home and did a nationwide search to go back into Chamber World. I really thought that there was no better time for chambers to be engaged and active and supporting small business than coming out of COVID for sure. Yeah.

Brandon Burton (02:56.088)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, tell us about your new venture, your new PR firm and the endeavors that you’re embarking on these days.

Christine Cribb (03:13.368)
Sure, sure. So you were cutting out a little bit there, but I believe you asked me what about after I left the chamber. Is that was that your question?

Brandon Burton (03:22.476)
Yeah, yeah, tell us what you’ve been up to these days with your PR firm and what you’re embarking on today.

Christine Cribb (03:28.298)
sure, sure. So I left the chamber last fall, just about this time of year. I left the chamber. visited with family all over the country and I was able to be present in my children and my grandchildren’s lives, which was really incredible. As everyone knows in chamber world, you’re balancing 27 plates and even though you’re visiting someone, you’re thinking of something else that should be done or needs to be done or did I tell somebody that? And so I was completely present. I came back.

I did go to school. went back to Cornell University and got an executive presence certification. And then I started my own. So I wrote my book January and February. I wrote my first draft and then started that entire process, which is phenomenal for anyone that wants to write a book. It’s just a great process of putting so much knowledge and story that you have to share that hopefully you make a difference to one person is incredible. So I wrote my book. I went back to school.

I started a little PR firm because I still have a great desire to help small businesses and businesses grow. And so instead of representing 600 members, I represent six. Six businesses that I can help put decision makers in front of them. I can give them exposure, public relations. It’s just delightful. It’s just a wonderful hands-on.

I am in charge of my own schedule. Don’t be envious, Chamber Champions, but I’m in charge of my own schedule. And I love the work so much. I still am absolutely passionate about helping businesses succeed.

Brandon Burton (05:08.13)
Yeah, and in this stage, you don’t have a board to report to or anything like that. So you’ve got a lot more freedom for sure. Yeah, I think.

Christine Cribb (05:16.93)
No board. Absolutely.

Brandon Burton (05:22.102)
I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard of the book writing process as being phenomenal from somebody. So you must have done something magical with the book. And a lot of other people talk about how strenuous it is and what a labor of love, those kind of descriptions. So I’m excited to learn about the book too. So most, go ahead.

Christine Cribb (05:41.707)
Right.

Christine Cribb (05:45.869)
super

Christine Cribb (05:50.242)
I just wanted to share that I thought I wanted to write a book. I wasn’t as secure in it until I did the research and realized that I had a story to tell and somebody will benefit from this story. And when I put it out to beta readers, the nicest compliment was, we can hear your voice. can hear that people could hear my voice in my words. And I thought, I’m going to share it.

I am not a literary virtuoso by any stretch of the imagination. I’m a Midwest girl. I speak in run-on sentences. I speak way too fast and I’m in the foothills of North Carolina. So be know that my editor constantly was slashing run-on sentence, run-on sentence, stop it, slow down. anyway, I did enjoy the process and it was, it’s my first of many books, I think. So I guess I enjoyed it where other people.

might have found it to be a challenge. I enjoyed it.

Brandon Burton (06:46.99)
That’s great, yeah, and other people say, I’ll never write another book again. And you’re just saying it’s the first of many.

Christine Cribb (06:48.653)
I also did lots of, Brandon, also did a lot of Yeah, rookie mistakes. So people, you you make mistakes. The first time doing something, you make mistakes. And I made a few. So, but it was a good lesson learned for sure. Yeah.

Brandon Burton (07:05.228)
Yeah, that’s great. So we’ll spend most of our conversation today talking about the theme of your book is attract. Well, it’s the title, but it’s the theme that we’ll carry on for this podcast recording is attract. Don’t recruit. And the importance of that.

When you look at it through a chamber lens, through a membership organization lens, I think it’s a great idea, a great concept, and great principles that we’ll dive into as soon as we get back from this quick break. All right.

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Brandon Burton (07:39.31)
All right, Christine, we are back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about attract, don’t recruit. So this is the title of your book, but tell us about how that title came to be, how that became the focus for your first book and what some of those lessons are that you share.

Christine Cribb (07:55.833)
Sure.

Super, thank you so much for asking. So a track don’t recruit came to me when I was coaching a membership position at my second chamber. I was coaching her and she said, so-and-so is not a member. I want to go get them and pitch them. And I said, you know, what’s interesting is that we doubled the chamber numbers in Cleveland County. And I never ever knocked on a door, handed a card.

said you’re not a chamber member come and visit me. We created energy and momentum that people leaned in and they came in and one by one we met every single one of them met with me.

They felt the benefits, they could see it and feel it, and they wanted to be part of it. The best example why I knew this was a track don’t recruit had to be the title, Brandon, is because in about my second year at this chamber, a woman came in and said, I can see so much energy on Facebook. I want to be part of this.

And I knew then that we had a little magic momentum going on and that needed to be the name of the book. Of course, I didn’t even know when I would be stepping down and retiring then, but I just knew then I would write a book and it would be called Attract Don’t Recruit. It would be all about infusing energy and making sure that people that ran chambers knew that they are the energy. They are responsible for managing up and managing down. They are the energy for their entire organization.

Christine Cribb (09:36.11)
So that’s kind of the meat and potatoes of the concept of how it got the title. And then it just evolved after that. would think of a topic like one of the most popular chapters right now that I’m getting feedback from is knowing your why.

Everyone talks about that. You really need to dive into why you do what you do and it empowers you to feel so much more authentic and convincing when you’re talking to someone when you understand your why. The other chapter that’s getting a lot of attention is the risky business I call it and it’s about taking risks. If you stay in the same mode you’re in, you will be in the same spot you’re in

two years from now, but if you take a risk and do something you’ve never done before. And in the book I share great risk takings. have a couple of really funny stories and then I share some failures. Like I can be completely bombed on something and it’s okay because at least I took the risk in doing it.

Brandon Burton (10:43.584)
Yeah, I like that. And with highlighting those two chapters, the why understanding your why is going to give you that drive that motivation to create that energy that you’re talking about, but also the risky business aspect. I’m sure there’s precautions, there’s things you need to look at. So you’re not just being, you know, totally flagrant with what you’re doing. But the risky business when you do something that’s exciting, it’s going to build that excitement that’s going to draw that attraction. Is there more that

can talk on on those two topics and building the energy around those those ideas.

Christine Cribb (11:20.599)
Absolutely, the risky business most importantly is that it’s strategic obviously and well vetted. I’ll share one really funny story. I was asked by a local community college to do a TV show.

and on Chamber World and Small Business. And so I went to my advisory committee, who is our board members. They’re the group that hired me and I wanted them to stay involved and I created an advisory committee. So the one, the chairman of the board said, let’s go drink some bourbon. We’ll have some bourbon brainstorming going on for, to discuss this. Well, I’m not a bourbon drinker.

So the host was about four doors down from where I live in my neighborhood, went to the bourbon brainstorm meeting. In five minutes, we decided that this TV show was not in our lane. We were not going to do it. and I agreed with that, but I just wanted it really well, once again, well vetted to take a risk of my time and energy. Right. And so I did drink my first old fashioned and I probably drank two of them.

Brandon Burton (12:33.804)
Okay.

Christine Cribb (12:36.347)
I then took something out of a jar and ate it and said, is the best grape I’ve ever tasted. And one of the men at the event said, at the meeting said, should we let her know that that is a bourbon soaked cherry? So that tells you that I was, I was enjoying that old fashioned.

On the way home, it was this time of year, on the way home, was kicking the leaves, walking home, and I had the brainstorm idea that we needed those gentlemen loved their bourbon. We needed to have a bourbon, gentlemen’s bourbon dinner. And we were looking for a way to raise capital funds to take care of the building.

So between within 24 hours, I was creating a gentleman’s bourbon dinner, tasting and dinner. I secured everything secured a sponsor, started to pull it together, pitch the board and said, let’s just try it. If it fails, it fails. But if let’s try it because of what I saw resonating with how much these gentlemen love their bourbon. So sure enough, we did it. I think it’s still in place now at the chamber and might be its fourth year.

that it’s happened, but it’s taken a risk. mean, we were adding alcohol in the Bible Belt in the foothills of North Carolina, and it was a huge success. We raised a lot of money, started the renovations on the building. It was fabulous. But that’s one example.

Brandon Burton (14:02.764)
Yeah, I think last time you’re on the show, we actually recorded the day after you had your bourbon event. it does, yeah. I believe so, I believe so. So I remember the energy coming from that, so yeah.

Christine Cribb (14:11.564)
That’s great. That’s great. Was it the first one? Was it? I think it was the… my gosh. That is great. that’s… Yes, that is one story that’s in the book. The other story I’ll tell share a failure also because everybody needs to take a risk of failing for sure. Coming out of COVID, there were so many positions that were open.

Brandon Burton (14:32.076)
Yes.

Christine Cribb (14:41.74)
Brandon that businesses needed employees. And so I thought, well, we’ll have a Friday career cafe. We’ll open up the chamber. We’ll have businesses set up little tables. We’ll have people come in that want to work that are seeking jobs. Well, we had businesses want to come in and they did great. They sat there, they visited with each other, they networked and we had tricklings of people coming in interested in looking for a job. And what that told me

was that our lane was not in the people looking for work. We did not work well in bringing those people in. We needed to leave that to the people that do that, NC Works. We needed to leave that to the groups that are part of unemployment and helping people get jobs and partner with them. We didn’t need to do something solo. So we tried it for three months and

And it was not successful and I was okay with that. At least we tried it and then we were able to partner with other organizations to help fill some of these positions for businesses. But we took a chance.

Brandon Burton (15:51.235)
Yeah.

So I think, and I like that example, it makes me think about even from the employer standpoint, when you interact with businesses or for those listening with your member businesses, the practice of attracting and not recruiting is beneficial even in the hiring process, when they are looking to bring on employees. I see this firsthand right now, my wife is applying for jobs and stuff and it’s tough when some of these businesses are not

trying to attract, you know, they’re they’re doing more of the recruiting style instead of, you know, showing how attractive they are and drawing people to them. And then they have the same problems all the time of, know, we just don’t have enough people or we can’t, you know, retain people because they’re not attracting. So I think there’s parallels from the membership organization to the employer standpoint as well. But it looks like you have an idea to expand on.

Christine Cribb (16:29.03)
Alright.

Christine Cribb (16:37.393)
Hmm.

Christine Cribb (16:49.57)
Absolutely.

Absolutely, I do because when you’re applying for a job You want to know also what’s in it for me your wife wants to know? What are you offering me? Not just what you need. I need you to and the old job description is not enticing anymore, right? And we just want to know is there family flexibility is there?

you know, what are the perks of working for you, not just hone in on what do you need? I think that’s really important. And I think there’s businesses that are definitely shifting to that because they want to attract the right people, not just fill a position, right? And then not as much with seeking employment, but with the membership aspect.

It’s all about relationship building, right? It’s about making somebody feel so incredibly valuable in your organization that they want to be part of it.

We worked really hard on, and it’s in the book of not, we tried never to say the word no. If someone asks for something and everyone in Chamber Champions, you know, people ask for things all the time. When someone would say, do you know what the Chamber should do? I would think, wait, am I sitting back eating bonbons? I don’t think so, right? You know what the Chamber should do. Anyway, I think,

Christine Cribb (18:19.674)
that relationship building. lost my train of thought there because that was so funny to me. I remember people saying that, but it’s all about relationship building for sure. Cultivating relationship that people want. and we never said no. So we had a list of things that we don’t do. Brandon, we didn’t say we can’t do that. That’s not our job. If somebody said, can I pay my electric bill here? Well, obviously you cannot pay your electric bill at the Chamber of Commerce, but instead of just saying no,

Brandon Burton (18:23.874)
Right, yeah. You talked about never saying no, right?

Christine Cribb (18:47.26)
Our front desk gal, the administrative assistant, Catherine, would walk the person out the front door, share with them going down to City Hall. They could pay their city bill, write down one block down, take a left, it’s right there. She would try to over deliver. She would not just simply say the word, no, we don’t do that. Then I had something called, can I say a bad word?

Brandon Burton (19:12.814)
Sure, we’ll clean it up if we need to.

Christine Cribb (19:15.022)
Okay, I said.

Clean it up if you need to, but we would have something in an email. People are so busy and they have so many emails. I would tell staff, just deliver a shit sandwich. Deliver a really nice opening. Be a nice, warm, hello, thank you so much for the email. Then get to the point without saying the word no, you’re dreaming. We can never do that. We’re a chamber of commerce. Deliver what you can do, not what you can’t, and then end it very, very positively. So I better come up with a new name for that, but that was the philosophy.

also no negative words never saying anything ill about your board somebody else your employees your members just keeping it so Genuinely positive that once you’re in the habit of not doing that. It’s like a piece of cake Yeah, and that infuses energy by staying positive all the time. Yeah

Brandon Burton (20:09.016)
and you’d rather have a cake than one of those sandwiches.

Christine Cribb (20:11.996)
Right. That’s right. That’s right. I also had a really special moment on the I have a chapter called train and trust. And in that chapter, I share a story about someone who’d worked for me that had been in chamber world for 11 years. And I took her to the first chamber conference, her first.

And when she came back, she bloomed in such a beautiful, incredible, empowering way, giving her some tools that she was able to go someplace for three days and speak the language of chamber world. Not only leaders and board members need to go to those, but when you bring your staff…

to an event like that, they feel so empowered when they get home and she bloomed, she was already phenomenal, but she even bloomed even more, more so. So that empowerment, the train them, give them the training and then trust them to do their job is really great.

Brandon Burton (21:16.342)
Yeah, I love that. So from a membership perspective, does the train and trust, does it have applications there as well when you’re trying to attract rather than recruit?

Christine Cribb (21:29.058)
Absolutely, so we, two things happened that taught me about this. The first was at my first chamber and a really great supporter and mentor of mine, Dan Aulis from Would Be Coffee, he came in and said, your structure is wrong. You have a membership coordinator, but you are on top of her all the time and wanting to make sure that every new member meets with you.

Why don’t you make her events coordinator and you just take membership? Because these people are coming in the door and they want to talk to you. So we actually changed the structure. Then when I got to North Carolina, there were only two of us at the time. So I absolutely met with every single new member. When we were able to grow, we hired a membership coordinator. And that is when I started to share that attract, don’t recruit. They’re walking in the door. Our job is to give.

not just sign that person up, but cultivate that relationship that makes them feel like they belong. You don’t need to be out on the street knocking on doors to people that don’t know what the chamber is. Let the domino effect, the energy in which you’re projecting, let that trickle down through your ambassadors, through your board, through your brand new members that just thank you. They thank you for these benefits and they walk out the door and they tell other people and they walk in the door. And it doesn’t happen overnight. We were coming out of COVID.

You know, I think on that first podcast I did, I shared that we were coming out of COVID. We had 14 events and that year coming out of COVID and within two years we had 149. I mean, we just set things on fire, whether it was a ribbon cutting once a week, whether it was adding more events like the bourbon event and some other events that we did too.

And so it’s really, it takes a little while, but it absolutely is worth the stop trying to beg people to join your Chamber of Commerce.

Brandon Burton (23:27.68)
Yeah, yeah, be attractive. Is there another key point or two that you want to draw out from the book before we wrap things up?

Christine Cribb (23:35.376)
Well, sure, one thing is, there’s so many cool things to share. But one is to make sure that you, one chapter is a refueling station, that you make sure you take time to take care of yourself. That is more critical than ever because that work is never ending and I’m well aware of that. When I could step back and be completely present in my children’s lives, I didn’t know that I was doing exactly what I told people not to do.

Brandon Burton (23:42.72)
I know it.

Christine Cribb (24:04.335)
which was just drinking from a fire hose, even though I thought I had it all together. The other thing is key performing indicators. When you start to brainstorm and take a risk, when you have key performing indicators that are valuable, not just the board wants to know how many members and how much money we have, use really good quality key performing indicators to help you determine your risk taking and the decisions that you make down the road.

And then there’s a whole chapter on time management because I tried every single one of them. There’s like 14 different tactics to manage your time. I’ve tried everyone. I’ve merged them. I’ve said this is never going to work for me, but there’s some great tools in there. And mostly it’s about really being the energy behind your chamber. You know, I have a hashtag called room shifter.

Like be a room shifter when you walk in a room people should light up you should be able to Attract the energy if you walk in a room and nobody’s walking up to talk to you You need to put a smile on your face and you need to start walking up to them and put shaking hands and working the room That’s not even beginning there’s 23 chapters brandon Yes, yes

Brandon Burton (25:17.687)
Right? Just hitting a few of the highlights, right? But I love the idea about being a room shifter because there should be an energy change and if there’s not, like you should take the energy you have and then go find those others that need to either have an infusion of that energy or just connect with that energy or whatever it may be, but it should change the tone of that room and show that what you’re doing matters, right?

Christine Cribb (25:24.111)
Yes.

Christine Cribb (25:36.813)
Yes.

Absolutely.

Yes, I also told people that if you’re not a networker, just come alongside me during an event and before you know it, you will be paired off with somebody that you had never met before. And if you yourself as a leader are not a networker, go find one. Go find one and learn how to do it. Really know how to work a room. You should light up that room when you walk into it. Yep.

Brandon Burton (25:54.35)
Great idea.

Brandon Burton (26:07.628)
Yeah, I love that idea. Christine, is a yeah, this has been great. You’ve hit on a lot of great ideas and topics and points from the book. I wanted to ask you for the Chamber Champion listening who’s wanting to take their organization up to the next level. What kind of tip or action item would you leave for them as they try to accomplish that goal?

Christine Cribb (26:10.884)
All right, the screen froze. There we go.

Christine Cribb (26:36.668)
I would like to tell them to start living like you’re a legend. Start energizing people, rooms, have over deliver in being authentic, but your energy, your positive energy shifts people, shifts rooms, shifts organizations. We all know the toolkit. We all have the rule. We’ve all read the books. We’ve all, we know how to run a chamber.

What you have to have is that authentic, genuine energy that takes it to the next level.

Brandon Burton (27:12.543)
I love that. It’s a great tip. So I know I had asked you this question when you were on the show before, but I like asking everybody for their current perspective. As we look to the future of Chambers of Commerce, how do you see the future of Chambers and their purpose going forward?

Christine Cribb (27:14.448)
Good. Good, good, good.

Christine Cribb (27:31.087)
I love it. I will look back and see what my answer was a couple years ago when I was here because it has changed. So when I wrote the book and I did some research on chambers throughout American history, what happened every decade was that chambers would shift their priorities across the country. They would shift.

what the priorities were depending on what was going on during that time. So I believe chambers will thrive and survive. Absolutely. I feel like they have to do it being open and willing to change and do things differently than they’ve ever done it before. So for example, obviously during COVID chamber was a huge part of workforce and knowing what was going on. The other thing would have been to be

I would tell Chambers to be a change agent. Be the change agent. If the future is AI, get on AI. Figure out what it is, offer classes, make sure that you learn everything that you can about it. If something’s going on in your county, get a seat at the table that lets you take the lead in being a change agent.

Brandon Burton (28:46.252)
Yeah, being able to just sit back and see the change happen is not going to serve your organization well. It’s not going to serve you as a leader. Well, you need to be that agent driving the change, recognizing where the future is going and be seen as that thought leader and that change agent. It’s ahead of the pack.

Christine Cribb (28:53.424)
No.

Christine Cribb (29:01.175)
Absolutely.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I feel like that’s, that’s, that’s phenomenal. That’s the deal maker is, is being able to get a seat at the table, to be part of what’s coming next, because there’s always something coming next. You can’t sit still for three, five, 10 years and think that you’re not going to have some changes going on that you need to be a major part of. Yeah.

Brandon Burton (29:30.22)
That’s right. That’s right. Find your original answer. Well, Christine, now the important question is for those listening who want to connect with you and learn more about attract, don’t recruit or where to pick up the book or connect with you, where would you point them and what would be the best ways to connect?

Christine Cribb (29:32.206)
Now you make me want to go back and look at my first video chat with you. I will look at that podcast for sure.

Christine Cribb (29:54.374)
Thank you.

Thank you so much. So you can purchase the book through Amazon. The name of the book is Attract Don’t Recruit, by Christine Cribb You can also reach out on Facebook in any time. I have a workbook coming out that’s going to be a companion workbook to the book, which will be great for directors, presidents of chambers. It’ll be great for board of directors and for staff. The workbook will have how to work your why.

really understanding your purpose and how to organize the time management aspect is in the workbook. That’ll be out by the end of December. So Facebook, but you can also reach me on my website is christinecribb.com. My next book will be announced on there. It’s called Mind Your Own Business. And it’s really for entrepreneurs that are trying to do a startup.

Brandon Burton (30:49.163)
Okay.

Christine Cribb (30:54.844)
you know, the people that say

I make a great lasagna, so I’m going to open an Italian restaurant. So it’s really a great guide for directors and presidents of chambers to guide entrepreneurs in the right direction. When you don’t know what you don’t know, you better find someone that does know, right? So that is one book. And then I’m going to write a book called Lipstick and Laugh Lines. And it’s about women that reinvented themselves after the age of 50. So if anyone has a great story,

of a woman who reinvented herself after 50 years old, it could end up in my book. And so if you think of the old chicken soup for the soul, I don’t think you’re old enough, Brandon, to remember that, are you? So if you remember, okay.

Brandon Burton (31:37.964)
Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s a great compliment, but yes, I do remember it.

Christine Cribb (31:45.457)
So Chicken Soup for the Soul, it will be that kind of stories. They’ll be small stories in there of women who reinvented themselves out of inspiration. So I got the bug to write books and so now I’ve got a couple more coming down the pipe. But ChristineCribb.com will get you to my website. Facebook will very easily message me on Facebook, follow me on Facebook. It’s really fun to watch what’s happened with the book.

We had 60 people come to the book launch at the chamber here in Shelby and I was overwhelmed. It was so humbling and exciting. Yes.

Brandon Burton (32:20.908)
That’s fun. That is really cool. Well, congratulations to you on getting your first book out there. We look forward to getting our hands on it, but also the future books that are coming out as well. And we’ll make sure to connect all your shout outs, your Facebook and website and Amazon and everything in our show notes. So it’ll be easy for listeners to connect and find the book and follow your journey. So this has been great. Thank you. You bet.

Christine Cribb (32:26.214)
Thank you.

Christine Cribb (32:40.592)
Thank you.

Christine Cribb (32:46.032)
Thank you so much. Brandon, thank you for this opportunity. Thank you.

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Importance of Vibrant Communities with Christopher Germain

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Brandon Burton (00:01.171)
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. Today’s guest is Christopher Germain, CEO of the Lake Superior Community Partnership, where he’s been making waves since stepping into the role in 2022. With a background that includes everything from environmental regulation to urban planning and political communications, Christopher brings a diverse and dynamic perspective to regional economic development. Before LSCP, he spent six years with the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, helping communities across the state through redevelopment ready community programs.

A proud Michigan native and Northern Michigan University alum, Christopher fell in love with Marquette and the Upper Peninsula and has become one of the strongest advocates. His leadership at LSCP has introduced an ambitious, comprehensive economic development model that is tackling major regional issues like housing, childcare, air service, and small business support.

When he’s not working, you’ll probably find him out exploring the natural beauty of the Upper Peninsula, cooking up something delicious in the kitchen, or even logging some time, or even logging some hours in flight training. He shares his adventures with his husband Aaron and their energetic cattle dog, Woody.

Christopher, 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.

Christopher Germain (01:51.448)
Sure, yeah, thanks, Brandon, for having me this morning. It’s really great to be here. We’re excited about this. know, additionally, beyond the flight training, which is usually the part people find the most interesting about me, you know, I’ve been teaching myself to code video games as well, because I don’t have enough to do, apparently. So that has been a really cool kind of feature as well. But honestly, my dog doesn’t let me do anything that sits down. know, if anyone else owns a cattle dog or a blue healer, they would understand.

Brandon Burton (02:17.321)
right? That’s awesome.

Christopher Germain (02:19.209)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (02:20.585)
Yeah, the flight training, is super interesting. A friend of mine is a flight trainer. has his own company doing flight training. And last Christmas, I had the idea, I reached out to him, like, hey, would you take my wife and I up to look at Christmas lights? And it was pretty cool to look at the Christmas lights from the sky. But there’s a lot of cool things you can do from the air. The video game coding too, that is interesting.

Christopher Germain (02:26.509)
you

Brandon Burton (02:50.539)
That’s a first that I’ve heard. So is that a, what drew the interest to coding video games?

Christopher Germain (02:58.317)
So I learned it a number of years ago and I kind of lost it. But honestly, what’s re-driven my renewal of it is an old video game from like the early 2000s that they don’t make anymore. And I’ve been trying to recreate it. So I’ve been using Claude and Chat GPT and all those AI coding assistants, you know, in addition to those years of actual school now.

games as best I can. So it’s pretty cool.

Brandon Burton (03:22.259)
That’s awesome. That is really cool. Well, tell us a little bit more about the Lake Superior Community Partnership to give us an idea of the size of the organization, staff, scope of work, budget, just to kind of set the stage for our discussion today.

Christopher Germain (03:38.383)
Yeah, absolutely. So the Lake Superior Community Partnership has been around for 28 years. We’re always say we were an organization that was born out of crisis. So in the mid 90s up here, we had an Air Force base called K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base. They used to launch B-52 bombers from it during the Cold War. And that Air Force base closed in the mid 90s, like a lot of other bases. And so there were three chambers at the time. They all formed into a single chamber called the Lake Superior Community Partnership and started down this path.

towards greater economic development in addition to chamber services. So today we’re an organization that really focuses heavily on economic development but retains those chamber pieces as well. We have 400 members currently, which is about a 30 % growth over the last three years as we’ve really changed our model. A 12-person team, about a $900,000 operating budget, but a multimillion dollar budget when you factor in the grants that we’re entrusted with from our state and federal partners as well. So…

We tackle honestly everything from traditional chamber services like business after hours and ribbon cuttings and breakfast events to a full-scale business retention expansion program, tackle issues like housing and childcare. We do advocacy in Lansing and DC. My friends joke that I’m never home, you know, because we’re always so active doing something, so.

Brandon Burton (04:54.121)
That’s right. Man, yeah, that’s enough to keep you busy there. Luckily, the 12 staff helped to get that done, I’m sure. that’s a…

Christopher Germain (05:05.806)
They sure do, and that’s about a 50 % growth over the last few years. So it’s nice as we’ve grown, our team has been able to grow.

Brandon Burton (05:12.598)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, for our discussion today, we’ll focus the majority of our time around the idea of the importance of vibrant communities and the different aspects that revolve around that topic. So we will dive in deep on that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Christopher, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about the importance of vibrant communities. So what does that mean for you there in the Lake Superior area as far as building a vibrant community? know communities look different everywhere, right? So for you guys, what does that look like to have a vibrant community and what does a chamber do to help facilitate that?

Christopher Germain (05:58.157)
Absolutely. So honestly, I think the test for vibrant community is pretty simple and it’s are you proud of your community, right? Every single community looks different but the first step to asking anyone to invest in your community is whether they see everyone around them believing in the future of that community. And so for some places that’s super vibrant, downtowns with tall buildings and lots of restaurants.

For other places, it’s vibrant neighborhoods, right? Homes that are well taken care of, community organizations that band together, small businesses, right? That really define the community. So up here in Marquette County, which is geographically the largest county in the state of Michigan and one of the largest east of the Mississippi, we have a bunch of different communities. So honestly, what it looks like in the city of Marquette is different than what it looks like on the west side of the county in Ishpemine and Ragani or in Big Bay or in Gwynne, or they’re the places that we cover as a countywide organization.

So, but to give you maybe a sense, you know, of some really great examples of what we think is driving community vibrancy is obviously downtown, right? Areas that people can walk, they’re walkable, the businesses are filled, there’s events. And we’ve seen some really incredible strides on that front that we still talk about here, including the Community of the Year here in Michigan, which is right here in Marquette County, thanks to all of their downtown vibrancy.

Brandon Burton (07:15.067)
Yeah, well, tell us more about that Community of the Year. That’s awesome. you’re right, for building that vibrant community, you do kind of have to have that hub, right? That central gathering place, that downtown, like you mentioned. And there’s going to be a different feel in different communities or different parts of the communities. being able to have that focus and that hub, I think, is important. But yeah, tell us about the award. That’s awesome.

Christopher Germain (07:18.798)
Yeah. Sure.

Christopher Germain (07:41.389)
Yeah, so, you know, the city of the Gani, which is about 10 miles outside the city of Marquette, has this incredible city manager. to give a shout out to Nate Heffron and all the work that he’s done around the community to drive that pride. This idea, again, that the Gani is a community that historically has a mining heritage to it. And a lot of mining communities have struggled in recent years. But when Nate came on board, he was able to harness that community pride that did exist and really leverage it into something else. And so.

using about a million dollars in state grants, they totally overhauled their downtown a few years ago, which has then resulted in this incredible resurgence of commercial and housing developments all throughout downtown. So there’s fire pits now, there’s events, they’re constantly still doing new events on top of everything else they already have. They’ve seen the biggest turnover in commercial investment they’ve ever had in their history as far as they can tell. And there’s just this sense of pride now.

And so the Michigan Municipal League every single year identifies what they call a community of excellence. It’s actually a really competitive award. They name finalists and you actually basically have to lobby for the votes to be named that. And so to get that from a town of a few thousand people here in Northern Michigan, which only has 3 % of the state’s population in our entire Upper Peninsula, is a huge win for us up here. And so we’re really proud of the work that they’ve done, but it’s translated to additional businesses.

additional economic activity that’s still spilling over today.

Brandon Burton (09:07.079)
Yeah, that’s great. So I very much think that in order to have a vibrant community, there has to be good things going on in the community, right? There needs to be jobs. There needs to be a good economy. There needs to be those opportunities to get out and connect with others and to be able to enjoy what the community has to offer.

From the chamber perspective, what are some of the approaches and you guys are heavily involved with economic developments? So what are some of those things you guys are doing to drive the stronger economy there to be able to help, you know, in the end have that vibrant community in a place where people want to be?

Christopher Germain (09:49.187)
Yeah, so ultimately we’re taking a really multi-pronged strategy here. So the core of our work for a long time has always been a business retention and expansion program, of course, which I think it’s important to have your pulse on the business community to understand what those barriers are, not only locally, but at the state and federal level. But in recent years, we’ve really expanded that to really focus on our overall health of our communities. What does that quality of life look like? And so for us, that means tackling issues like housing.

It means helping with the availability of childcare. In a rural area like ours, it means ensuring that we have convenient and accessible flight service. A lot of rural areas might have one or two flights a day. And so that’s not exactly conducive to business. If you need to get out and that flight schedule doesn’t work. And then even for us, we dive even deeper and then we talk about rural healthcare. We talk about energy costs, which are very high in the Upper Peninsula compared to most of the country and how all of that ultimately impacts

how people feel about their community, right? And again, that sense of pride. It’s so easy, frankly, to derail community efforts, right, with the negativity that you can see on social media or that people show up to public meetings. And so working as a chamber to go meet with those businesses, to hold public events, to bring as much from outside, like from underneath, I should say, the paywall, right, a membership of the LFCP and just do good community work.

is really vital to us. And it’s possible because of our public sector partners really coming to the table. I think it’s primarily probably due to our economic development side of the house versus the chamber side of the house. But by combining the two, we’re able to leverage the benefits of both, right, and help our small businesses connect with the public sector and connect with their neighbors and connect with each other. And so they can actually offer their services, you know, in a coffee shop from the art shop down the street.

We see those kind of connections happen too and that drives that community pride too.

Brandon Burton (11:45.384)
Yeah. So what really stood out to me was the flight service and being able to have a focus on that and help bring more flights and more people in. How do you approach something like that? I mean, I think, you know, a flight will come and go as there’s a demand for it is what I would assume, but maybe I’m assuming wrong. So how do you approach that to try to get more flights coming in and out of town?

Christopher Germain (12:04.856)
sure.

Christopher Germain (12:11.116)
Yeah, you know, so it’s interesting for us up here in the Upper Peninsula, we have six commercial airports for an area of about 300,000 people. Now we’re really geographically dispersed, right? So it makes sense that you can’t just have one. But five of those six airports, federal subsidies through a program called Essential Air Service. So program that was set up in the 80s when the airlines deregulated and basically it was meant to help transition rural areas as consolidation happened. They would maintain

Brandon Burton (12:24.691)
Yeah.

Christopher Germain (12:40.142)
critical air service if you were too far away from a hub. It’s become one those programs that has existed kind of into perpetuity, right, whether or not, and our airport actually doesn’t get essential air service because at the time of deregulation, we had two airlines and one of the requirements was you can only have one. And so for us, what air service looks like is actually going to meeting with airlines and doing what we call demand and leakage studies where we actually see what demand is generating in our travel shed and where it’s going.

In our case, we’re actually losing 52 % of the demand that generates in our travel shed to places that are either subsidized by the federal government or folks are driving the six hours to Chicago to take an international flight, which sometimes that makes sense. So we literally go meet with airlines. We do the data studies. We do marketing. And we work directly with our airport to make sure that they’re enhancing the overall experience. in the last state budget,

The LSCP was really the one who put in the request for three million dollar state investment in our airport primarily because we don’t get federal subsidies and we’re now working through how to spend those dollars in a way that’ll drive long-term fiscal sustainability for the airport which will make it more appealing to airlines and I think part of you all of that work we’ve done for years just last week maybe two weeks ago now actually the

United Airlines announced that they’re coming to Marquette-Sawyer Regional Airport, it will be the only airport in the region that has three, all three major airlines coming out of our airport going to Chicago, Minneapolis, and Detroit. So it’s been a collective effort. It really takes a whole village to make that happen, but you just have to stay proactive, sort of the answer.

Brandon Burton (14:21.181)
Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s a great win to be able to see American come in and to be able to open those doors. Yeah, yeah, that’s amazing.

Christopher Germain (14:26.766)
Yeah, we were very surprised but happy. Two years ago, I was out in Utah, sky west, which is one of the biggest regional carriers in the country. We had lost service in Minneapolis in 2022 during the pilot shortage and the plane shortage prompted by COVID. We were able to get it back starting this year and it’s been a game changer for our businesses, especially who have business out west.

They can now hop on a plane in the morning via Minneapolis and make it out to the west coast by lunchtime.

Brandon Burton (14:58.119)
Yeah, that’s awesome. That is, that’s a game changer for sure. So I know you guys recently had a local economic exchange. You want to tell us what that was about and how that plays into this whole conversation of building vibrant communities?

Christopher Germain (15:16.686)
Yeah, absolutely. So we were really proud of this event. It’s been on my list since I started in this role in 2022 to just bring together the public sector, the private sector, our nonprofit partners and have a day focused on solutions, right? We sort of know what our challenges are. And so the whole idea was to bring folks together, talk about how we move the needle on issues like housing and energy and childcare, rural healthcare, all of those issues. And so the day had about 120 attendees, which I…

say for a first time event is a really big win. We’ve had nothing but positive feedback about it. But ironically, you know, people laughed at us a little bit when we started out the day with a data dump, right? Just tons of data. We had the Federal Reserve come and go through their data. We had our own data. And I think we saw some rolling eyes and some confusion, but it really set the foundation really well for folks for the rest of the day. And so between that, from there, we went to an inspirational story from the village of Casapolis, which is an incredible success story here in Michigan.

a small village that just decided enough was enough, right? And they were just going to go after every resource they could go after to make their community more vibrant. And that led to these great breakout sessions and a legislative panel. And so we were just so proud of the events. And in the month since we’ve had it, the momentum has been very real. We’ve had more people come to the table. We’ve had more ideas come out of the woodwork than we can even handle right now. And so that’s a good problem to have.

We’re really proud of it as we move into planning for 2026 and figuring out what are our focus areas. They’ll likely come out of that event.

Brandon Burton (16:47.175)
Right. Now that event sounds like it’s great and really just drawing attention to some of these good things that are happening throughout the region. But at the beginning, as we started talking about vibrant communities, I really liked what you had to say about really creating a place that you want to be. it may be tough to measure, you know, what is, are we a vibrant community? Have we increased our vibrancy? we decreasing? Where are we at? But what are some of those

marks you look at as far as is your community vibrant? it going in the right direction? Is it going the opposite way? What are we doing to help kind of regenerate that excitement and desire to be a part of the community? What are some of those things that you look at to measure that?

Christopher Germain (17:32.921)
Sure. So, you know, I think there’s, yeah, there’s qualitative and quantitative stuff, right, that you can look at. And so I think on the quantitative stuff, there’s some simple things like population growth, right? Are you seeing new housing being built? Are you seeing new students in your school districts? Are you seeing investment, right, in your downtowns your business community? And you can ask your businesses if they’re seeing growing sales because that likely indicates new events or more people coming to those businesses, choosing to spend their dollars locally.

We can look at city municipal tax revenue, right? As well as a really big key indicator of a vibrant community. But it really is that qualitative stuff. I always get those two mixed up. The qualitative stuff that you walk downtown and you see folks, you know, are they pointing to the shops, right? Are they deciding to move events that maybe left the community back into the community? Are people taking ideas that they have and actually finding the other people in the community who also share those and can…

create those ideas. And like one really great example is there’s a group of folks in the western side of the county that are looking to create a Christmas market for the first time ever. And I honestly think maybe five years ago, you would have found a lot of naysayers, right? Who would have said there was just no way this is going to happen. And today that momentum feels so real. And so they had no problem finding people to form a committee and finding partners and finding people to build stalls. And so

it’s that kind of qualitative stuff that is really hard to measure. Economic development, think in general, you we’ve really always measured ourselves based on investment and job creation. And those are really core metrics that we need to have, but there’s a lot more to economic development than just that piece of it. And so I think that’s where community really comes in.

Brandon Burton (19:16.795)
Yeah, I think, you know, we’ve all seen and talking for the people listening as well. We’ve all seen the communities for the downtown is just basically a ghost town, right? Where it’s just depressing. It’s sad. It’s, you know, it hasn’t had any life going on there in 20 or 30 years, maybe. versus the communities where there’s stuff happening, you know, there’s events going on. There’s holiday things. There’s, you know, all these different things that happen and drive people out there.

Christopher Germain (19:30.84)
Mm-hmm.

Brandon Burton (19:47.012)
and really build that sense of community. One of those things you had mentioned as far as measuring the growth was the population growth and the housing. I know housing is one of those things that you guys are trying to tackle as an organization. What are some of the approaches? I mean, obviously, you guys are creating a vibrant community because it becomes enough of an issue that the chamber needs to say, hey, what are we going to do about housing? So what are some of those solutions?

Christopher Germain (20:01.88)
Yep. That’s right.

Christopher Germain (20:12.846)
Sure.

Brandon Burton (20:16.655)
the approaches you guys are taking to housing.

Christopher Germain (20:20.014)
Sure, so we could do a whole podcast on this brand and just in alone. And as a trained planner, of course, we have a plan, right? And so we have an eight point plan right now that’s really focused heavily on things like collecting data and educating the public, right? Arming folks who want to say yes in my backyard and showing up and giving public officials cover to approve housing projects. But really there’s some really cool, tangible things that are happening too.

Brandon Burton (20:22.055)
Right?

Christopher Germain (20:45.218)
Marquette County is the first county that we’re aware of, at least similar to ours, that has a dedicated housing specialist. So somebody whose full job is basically to work with developers and work with local government officials to move the needle on projects. And he also happens to be the executive director of our land bank. So we have a kind of a one-two punch there in terms of having two great tools. The LSTP and a number of other partners helped fund that job and our position, I should say initially, and we really…

move forward with that. But we’re also working on things like pre-reviewed housing blueprints. We are collecting data through a target market analysis that shows our market could hold up to 10,000 new and rehabilitated housing units over the next five years. We don’t think we’ll hit those numbers. We think that’s where the market breaks, but there’s clearly a demand for those. And the story I always tell people honestly is

I went to Northern, you in the late 2000s, as you mentioned, the introduction and like a lot of folks, I left after that, not because I wanted to, because I just couldn’t find an opportunity in the field I was in. Ended up in Ohio and spent the next 14 years trying to get back. And in 2022, I was recruited back to this position. And the night before I had to give the board an answer, my answer was no. And it wasn’t because I didn’t want to be here. It was because I literally couldn’t find anywhere to live.

And so it was too hard to move from Grand Rapids. And I had to find something that my husband would also be happy with. And so something, know, a view of the lake and all that kind of stuff. But it is still was, you know, I don’t ever want anyone to have to go through that situation. And we lose far too many northern students who want to stay here or people just in general who want to stay here. And they start to get priced out as second homes get built and as Mark Hat, you know, particularly does get more expensive.

to live in. So that’s really why housing is a critical issue because if the folks who work in our restaurants and run our schools and operate our libraries, right, and public safety and all these folks can’t find places to live, you lose the vibrancy of the community. And so that’s really why we take an issue. And so we have a website, it’s called housingnow906.org that I always tell everyone to go to. Everything we do around housing is there. We’re happy to share it.

Christopher Germain (22:56.418)
We’re really proud of our leadership position on housing because I think a lot of economic developers in general would tell you housing wasn’t on our radar even five years ago. It was somebody else’s problem. And now I think we’ve really figured out that we’re losing projects. We are losing deals and losing expansions because our businesses can’t find the workers that they need to expand. So they’re opting to just not expand. so housing is the real deal there.

Brandon Burton (23:24.883)
Wow. I almost feel like you needed to have that experience of not being able to find housing to really be able to share your personal story about why this is so important. know, the community loses out on talent. Like you said, the vibrancy when we don’t have places for these people to live and be a part of the community. So that’s a, I love that you guys are approaching that and making that a priority there at the organization.

Christopher Germain (23:51.543)
Absolutely. Yeah, it’s necessity. Every meeting I have, Brandon, housing, housing, housing, it doesn’t matter what it is. Housing comes up.

Brandon Burton (23:58.634)
Yeah, and there’s a lot of creative opportunities out there that I’ve heard from different chambers. And each one is unique to their own community. it’s fun to see those answers, those solutions come to pass. Well, Christopher, I wanted to ask for those listening who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them in trying to accomplish that goal?

Christopher Germain (24:31.118)
So, you know, the thing I always tell folks is chambers should be talking to their local planners, like their local community planners. And you know what? It feels like an odd one to throw out there, but the decisions that your planning commissions and your planners make around zoning and regulatory reform and the future of the community impact the business community. Right. And so having a really deep understanding of those and not having a confrontational relationship with them, I think is really critical to any chamber really being successful.

And again, I say as a trained planner and as a board member of the Michigan Association of Planning. So like I see both of those worlds and I see how planners also don’t necessarily understand chambers very well or economic development in general. so having that dialogue, I think is important. So breakout, right, of the traditional chamber training modules, which are again, very helpful. And I do a lot of those as well, but go to a planning conference, take a zoning course, take something that can really help you understand.

with that other side of the regulatory environment and seeing, and it’ll make you a much more effective advocate for your businesses when you understand.

Brandon Burton (25:36.754)
Yeah, I have not heard that as a tip yet and that is so wise as I think of a chamber executive just being able to understand what’s possible from the community planning standpoint, being able to understand what obstacles they’re dealing with as well, what their constraints are, what their blind spots are, and being able to come to the table and say, here from the business community, these are the things that are important to have a vibrant community. So how can we make these things match up?

and find solutions together, but without having those conversations ahead of time and kind of knowing what those community planners are thinking and what they’re working with makes it really hard to walk into those conversations without having it be a little bit confrontational because you’re coming from perspectives that neither of you understand. So I think that’s such a wise tip. Yeah, I love that.

Christopher Germain (26:29.658)
Exactly. You know, and the example I always get folks brand into is I sat on the master plan steering committee for the city of Marquette and early on we had the set principles, right, guiding principles for the plan. And one of them was to protect neighborhoods. And, my response was like, yes, like I love the area where they live in and I don’t want it to massively change. But if we’re setting out to not change anything, we’re not creating new business opportunities and we’re not creating opportunities for the neighborhood to really evolve in a way we want it to.

And I think it took the business community pushing to change that a little bit. And so it’s a balance, right? But really, our local government partners and planners, not our enemies. They really can be our allies when we understand each other.

Brandon Burton (27:10.589)
Right. Yep, absolutely. Very well said. Well, 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?

Christopher Germain (27:27.864)
So I think there’s always going to be this human need for connection, right? And this idea of learning from each other and partnering together. And so I see chambers that are embracing technology like AI to amplify their value for their members. And whether it’s a smarter business listing or taking your networking events that maybe are heavily on networking right now and incorporating an educational component to them, that’s what we did with our breakfast and business series. So it’s not just about having coffee with your friends, but…

you always leave having learned something or met somebody new. That’s where I really feel the future is continuing to evolve in that way, but also integrating economic development. I’ll admit like our structure is very complex and sometimes it is hard to balance the economic development and the chamber side of things. And sometimes quite frankly, they’re in conflict. And so trying to figure out how to balance those two can be really difficult. But I also think if chambers in their local communities have an opportunity to

partner with their economic development organizations to consider some sort of structural marriage, I would really encourage them to do that because I also think that really is the future if you can plan it correctly. There’s a lot of models that don’t work too, but if you can find the one that fits, you’re going to be better off as a chamber working directly with your economic development organization than you are as separate entities.

Brandon Burton (28:45.789)
Yeah, yeah. And there’s no harm in looking to other communities and seeing how they do it and what’s working for them and seeing what those structures look like that are working. All of us have those other communities we look to and maybe want to be a little bit more like and look and see what those structures look like in those communities. So I think that’s a great.

Christopher Germain (28:54.721)
yeah.

Christopher Germain (29:06.956)
Absolutely our model today, I borrowed from someone downstate, you know, and I’m not shy about it. And so it works.

Brandon Burton (29:11.389)
There you go.

There you go. Well, Christopher, I wanted to ask for those listening who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you guys are doing there, how you guys are doing things there at the LSCP. Where would you point them? What would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you?

Christopher Germain (29:33.106)
So honestly the easiest way is to find me on LinkedIn. My team jokes a lot that I’m on there more than I am on Facebook and so people can see that. But also you know our website marquette.org so marquette.org has all of our contact information so they can reach out to us directly that way for sure. Yeah I love to chat about this stuff you know I sort of stumbled into this world and like so many of us but I find it fascinating.

Brandon Burton (30:00.551)
That’s perfect. We’ll make sure we get both your LinkedIn account and your website on our show notes for this episode. So we’ll make it easy for listeners to be able to connect with you. But thank you for spending time with us today, sharing your insights, your experience with the listeners here at Chamber Chat podcast. Really appreciate you spending time with us today. I think it was a fun and insightful conversation as well. So thank you.

Christopher Germain (30:14.475)
you

Christopher Germain (30:26.456)
Awesome, thanks for having me Brandon, I appreciate it.

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Workforce Housing with Natalie Hawn

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Brandon Burton (00:01.269)
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. Today’s guest is a dynamic leader shaping the future of business and community development in Northwest Missouri. Natalie Hawn is the President and CEO of the St. Joseph Chamber of Commerce, where she champions economic growth.

strategic partnerships and a thriving business environment. With nearly two decades of experience at the chamber, Natalie previously served as senior vice president and membership and brings a strong background in business development and public relations honed through roles with Woody Bibbins and Associates and Prior Resources Inc.

A proud graduate of Missouri Western State University, Natalie’s influence extends far beyond her city. She’s the treasurer of the Hawthorne Foundation, a commissioner on the Missouri Military Preparedness and Enhancement Commission, and a national representative in the Air Mobility Command Leadership Academy. She’s also a 2024 recipient of the prestigious Women of Achievement Award from Lieutenant Governor Mike Kehoe.

From education to the arts and military readiness to economic innovation, Natalie is deeply woven into the fabric of her community, serving on numerous boards and leading countless initiatives that drive progress. She’s a passionate advocate and connector and a true civic leader. Natalie, we’re thrilled to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat podcast. I’d love to give you a moment 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.

Natalie Hawn (01:47.97)
Hi guys, and wow, that was probably the best intro ever. Way to go, Brandon. So I am here in St. Joseph, Missouri. I have a 16 year old son that just played in the district champions of his high school, six day high school here. We played a Kansas City team last night. Unfortunately, we didn’t.

Brandon Burton (01:52.929)
we go, chat GPT.

Natalie Hawn (02:14.958)
win. So it’s the end of fall football season, but we have a couple years left because he was a sophomore this year. So he’s, I’ve spent a lot of my fall supporting his team and their football. So that’s kind of been my life recently. But I am from Mid-Missouri originally. I grew up on a farm. I have four brothers and I absolutely love Chamber World and I love what I do every day. It gives us passion.

to build a better community so that my son can have a better place to live for tomorrow. So that’s a little bit about me.

Brandon Burton (02:49.025)
That’s That’s what makes fall so great is football. I love it.

Natalie Hawn (02:52.118)
Yeah, the boys of fall. love it. And we are at the home of the Kansas City Chiefs training camp. So we’re big Chiefs fans in this part of the country. And I know that’s unpopular right now. I love it that we celebrate that you should be successful, but not too successful. Because we love you for a minute. Now we hate you. Be successful, but not too successful. But we’re still diehard Chiefs fans in this part of the country.

Brandon Burton (03:08.863)
Yeah, don’t do it over and over again. We want to see other people win too, right?

That’s right.

That’s funny. Well, tell us a little bit about the St. Joseph Chamber just to give us an idea of the size, staff, scope of work, your budget, just to kind of set the stage for our discussion today.

Natalie Hawn (03:31.234)
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been, as Brandon said, I’ve been at the Chamber for 20 years in a little bit different role. The last four years, I’ve been the CEO. So prior to that, I kind of ran the whole membership side of the House. Now I have the opportunity to kind of dive more into economic development and really see this full scope of the Chamber. So it’s been a lot of fun. But our Chamber has about 1,300 members.

Our community is about 75,000 and we have a budget of 2 million. We do economic development and chamber. So we have a contract with the city and the county to do economic development. And we also have economic development partners that go into that budget. So we’re combined budget for about 2 million. We have a staff of 11.

Brandon Burton (04:21.205)
good. That definitely helps to give us that context. Obviously, every chamber has a different size, different resources, different focus even. But as we kind of hone our focus on to our topic for discussion today, which will be around workforce housing, that’ll help to give us that background and kind of what those needs are in your community. So we will dive into that topic as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Natalie Hawn (04:25.165)
Yeah!

Natalie Hawn (04:30.156)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (04:47.905)
All right, Natalie, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, our topic that we’re diving into today is about workforce housing. So I know this has become an issue, a hot topic rather, throughout a lot of the country, trying to figure out how do we, and it depends on the community, right? Some are trying to figure out housing for employees who maybe live outside the community, who have a long commute that are coming in, maybe the housing’s not affordable. Different scenarios that have

different needs to look for workforce housing. as you have the lens of the St. Joseph Chamber, tell us what needs are arising and how you guys are working to approach those needs.

Natalie Hawn (05:30.84)
So when I took over this role, the very first meeting I had was with one of our major employers. it hadn’t been a conversation or really a space that we had really been involved in. And they said to me, you have to figure out this workforce housing piece. We just can’t find affordable appropriate housing for our workers. And they’re having to drive a significant amount of way to work. And so I started digging into that and really

trying to better understand the need, because it was really, we were hearing it kind of across the country. This was about four years ago, but we weren’t really hearing it in our community and nobody was really, nobody was really digging in to try to solve it. So I started, I did some surveys, started having some conversations and kind of found that our members really were struggling with workforce housing and it really was a major issue to them. And I think they really hadn’t come to us because they weren’t sure what role we could play in solving it.

But we did a survey and we recently did a labor reason study and it showed that we are having labor issues, that we are significantly having challenges with people living here. And we had a population decline of 6.4%. And the top three reasons, number two was affordable appropriate housing. And so we thought, okay, you know, this is different world today for economic development. You know, it used to be that you could kind of say,

economic development, we’re going to, we have great land, we have great incentives, they’ll come here. It’s no longer that way. Now we have to kind of think about how do we solve the problems for that business? It’s such a competitive market these days because of technology and incentives. You can really live and create your business anywhere. So for the really great companies that we have here, what are we doing so they continue to expand and grow here?

to solve their problems. So we kind of dug into this workforce housing initiative because nobody was really having the conversation. And we did a study, so we partnered with the city and we did a study so that we could really make our decisions based in facts versus emotion. We intuitively knew what the challenges were, but it’s always great to really know what the data is telling you so that you can do some solution-driven.

Natalie Hawn (07:51.662)
problems around facts and data. And it really helps when you need to go out and get funding or get people to the table to be able to say, no, this really is the challenge and here’s where we are. So we found that we needed all housing, but we found that we really needed workforce housing. And I’ll break that down. We needed housing for people that make $50,000 to $100,000. The average wage in our community is $57,000. And we’re the seventh highest in the state.

So if you made our average wage, you were really having a hard time finding appropriate affordable housing. And we were getting, as we dug into this, were hearing we have 30 teachers living on couches. We had a lot of our young engineers that were having to drive in from other areas and they were having to spend a lot of time and money commuting and they didn’t wanna do that. They wanna live here, they couldn’t find any place to live.

And so as we dug into that, found that there are really what the challenge was. think, you know, our, had never got around the table and kind of thought about, we have to cultivate an environment to solve the problem of what we need. just assumed that developers and builders would provide the housing that we needed if there was a need. And that’s not the case today. And that’s why you’re seeing it across the country. So we incentivize low income housing.

through the state with tax credit dollars. And I think that’s probably similar across the country. So we have quite a bit of low income housing because there’s incentives for developers to make money. And then we have high income housing because you can make money on a custom built home. But where in today’s climate where you can’t make money is that moderate middle housing. So it’s really hard if you’re not incentivized with a tax credit.

to really be able to keep that rental rate low. So what we’re finding is the rental rates are extremely unproportionate for those folks that make 50 to $100,000. And in that housing study, we saw that we are about 2,400 units of rental or home under the need that we have in our community for people that make that amount of money. So we had to really get creative and think differently about how to solve this problem.

Natalie Hawn (10:19.566)
And so we kind of approached it like we would in economic development. So we give incentives for people that are expanding or bringing a job here. So why not give incentives for someone that’s developing housing that we actually need? Now, this is not something our community has done. So this took us probably two years to really educate.

the municipalities and the partners to understand the role they play because again, they’re just thinking well, if there’s a need there’s a demand somebody will fill it not if they’re not making money on it. It’s still business guys. So we had to just come at it a little differently. So we created a task force that was ran by the chamber and we’ve got everybody who touches housing at the table. So whether that’s your housing authority, that’s your Habitat for Humanities, your nonprofits, but also your for-profits, your builders.

your bankers, your home mortgage loaners, your employers. I’ve invited our major employers to the table to talk about what they need. The school district, because we have a huge need for teacher housing because teachers don’t make a lot of money. So we brought everybody to the table and we started facilitating the conversation. So we started bringing in speakers and topics and kind of educating the players on what is happening.

and what’s not happening and what other communities are doing. And by starting that conversation and really kind of championing the needs in the community, so educating the politicians of what we needed and educating the community of what we needed, then we were able to actually start, that’s where we were able to start making real change. So we went out and we looked at a community that was doing some great work in this space. And

we were able to kind of replicate some of the things that they were doing. So we wanted to go, how are you making this work? How are you doing this? They had, so for the state of Missouri, it might be a little different, but you could certainly do these things in your own communities. We were able to find the Abandoned Housing Act, and that was one of the tools that they were using. So we know that you have to be a nonprofit to do the Abandoned Housing Act. We have a lot in our community of blighted vacant properties that we could.

Natalie Hawn (12:36.832)
rehab and kind of get back on the tax rolls that we could have as affordable properties. So we started with, we started having conversations in our community and from that a group of four ladies that work at several of our major employers, CFO, HR came together and started a nonprofit called the Housing Improvement Initiative and they’re at the task force with us. A couple of them are on my board of directors and they started this nonprofit

And here’s what’s really cool about it. They have this nonprofit and they give first right or refusal to their employees to purchase these homes that they’re rehabbing that they got off of the Abandoned Housing Act. So they put their employees through a boot camp. And so that boot camp, they kind of target generational renters. And so they’re putting them through a boot camp where they can learn how to get their credit scores up. They can learn.

fiscal responsibility, they can learn how to be a good homeowner, and they give them a mentor in home ownership, and they put them through this boot camp. Once they’ve graduated the boot camp, then they become qualified to purchase one of the homes that they have. So this has come quickly. They put this whole program together, and we now have eight homes in their control. They’re buying and…

more through auction as well as through the Abandoned Housing Act every day. And then they’ve come up with creative ways to rehab these homes. So they’re working with our Youth Alliance on a trades program. So the students in our community get to go out and learn from tradesmen as they rehab these homes. So it’s a great way of kind of learning and skilling up for trades for future jobs for high school and young adults that need a trade. So

That’s been really great. And then we also partner with for-profits on that as well, where we can bring a rehabber in and they can, you know, rehab the home and we can certainly get it back out to a person to live in quicker than we do through the Youth Alliance program. So we have a couple of different ways that we do that. They sell the home then to somebody who has graduated from the program or somebody who’s qualified that kind of meets the scope. is not, it’s a…

Natalie Hawn (14:56.302)
Non-for-profit, so it’s not a for-profit. Anything they make, they put back into purchasing another home or rehab, et cetera. And the reason this is important is because about 60 % of our homes that are kind of in that affordable market of the range that are needed, they are really getting swept up by landlords. So the cash buyers, if you’re a normal buyer, you’re gonna take that cash offer. You’re not gonna take the chance on that person that needs a VA loan, that veteran.

because it’s a harder process. But they will not sell to a cash offer. They will not sell to someone that has a VA loan or has a first time home buyer. So their program is set up in a way where they’re really trying to get this into the hands of the people who really need it. And they’re targeting neighborhoods so that you can truly have change in that neighborhood. And they’ve targeted neighborhoods close to their manufacturing facilities. We are a…

large manufacturing towns. So they’ve kind of targeted neighborhoods around their facilities so they can start to build community. That is one example of really something that has come from conversation about need, identifying need, the task force. The chair of my task force actually started that program. So we were really excited, but we certainly didn’t stop there. have Doug.

so much deeper. So it’s one thing to start a task force and start the conversation, but you can also start to move the needle on real progress and change. So we dug a little deeper and we saw that one of the great tools that another community was using was a Nuisance Act. And we found out that St. Joseph didn’t qualify at state legislation for the Nuisance Act that only Kansas City and St. Louis did. So this last legislative session, we worked

hand-in-hand with our legislators and we got some legislation passed where St. Joseph got added to the Nuisance Act. And what’s cool about the Nuisance Act is it now allows us the ability to go after commercial blighted buildings, vacant buildings versus just abandoned houses. So we’ve also started our own charitable trust that we are now having, we’re working on a scoped area. So we’ve been working on our downtown. We have a lot of vacant buildings downtown.

Natalie Hawn (17:14.882)
that are owned by absentee out of state homeowners, a lot of times for tax shelter. So, but then we have people where we’re really trying to make strides and putting in a lot of investments and redeveloping certain areas of our downtown. So with the Nuisance Act, we’re able to go after that owner that maybe isn’t as progressively moving our downtown forward. And we’re able to put some pressure on them.

to either rehab their building and make it not blighted or we give them the option to gift it for the tax write-off to our charitable trust. We’ll then turn around and sell it for a dollar to a developer that will rehab it and really get it back on the tax rolls so that it becomes a thriving piece of our downtown because we have these investors that are putting hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars into

rehabbing these buildings into our downtown, only to have an investor that maybe has a vacant blighted building that is really making it where people want to come commit crimes, catch it on fire. And then that really puts the whole progress that you’re making in your downtown at risk. So we have really kind of put our money where our mouth is per se, and we’re really trying to dig in and kind of tackle some of these issues.

Brandon Burton (18:43.763)
So, I mean, a chamber is perfectly positioned to be able to go after these difficult issues and find solutions and convene those parties to get the job done. I love the idea of the Housing Improvement Initiative and the nonprofit that was built around that.

So I had a question about that, also with the Nuisance Act. So first with the housing improvement initiative. So as they rehab these homes and go to sell them, are they being listed close to market price or are they keeping the prices lower to try to attract or try to make it work for those employees or how the pricing I think could become a difficult thing.

Natalie Hawn (19:26.562)
Yeah, so they are pricing them affordable for the person who needs to purchase it. So we know that the market hole, so we have the hole in rental, but we also have the hole in kind of that first time homebuyer. So we know in our market, 120,000 to 200,000, you can’t find a home. And if it is available, they’re getting swept up by the cash buyers.

So that is really where that first time home buyer or traditional home is where the need is. So they’re making it affordable. They are not flipping it and then putting in high rates because they’re not trying to make money on it. They want to get their employee into that home for a responsible, affordable amount in a safe neighborhood. And it’s also transforming those neighborhoods because you took that vacant home.

that obviously, you know, a couple of them have had squatters in it just because, you know, so it takes that vacant home and makes it a home again. And then you put an excited homeowner in it versus a renter, which there’s nothing wrong with renters, but we know that if you put the homeowner in and they are just going to have more pride in it, they’re just going to be more excited about it. And you do that with

Brandon Burton (20:41.739)
And they’ve been through a boot camp to know how to be a great homeowner. That’s right.

Natalie Hawn (20:43.596)
And they’re giving, they’re giving mentors. I mean, they have resources and people that are supporting them and cheering for them. And then when you put them in a neighborhood, you put two or three of them in a neighborhood, the pride becomes contagious. And that slowly starts to turn around your neighborhood. So no, they do not make money on those. If they happen to make money on the project, they just put it into the next project. And then think about the employee retention piece of that, Brandon.

Brandon Burton (21:05.995)
goes back into. there’s, yeah.

Natalie Hawn (21:10.4)
So if you care enough about your employee that you have rehabbed at home, put them through a boot camp and help them achieve a dream that they’ve never been able to thought possible, how loyal are they gonna be to your place? Like it’s a great employee retention tool.

Brandon Burton (21:23.957)
Yeah, that’s an awesome point. So is there any stipulation to those new homeowners, first time homeowners, do they need to stay in the home for so long when they sell it? Does it go for STIBs to another employee? How does that work?

Natalie Hawn (21:38.776)
So they do put some clawbacks on it and they don’t limit it to employees. So the employees that go through the boot camp don’t have to buy a home from them. They just get first right or refusal. And right now it’s such a new program, you know, that they’re not churning out the houses as fast as the need. So it’s kind of twofold. You’re getting your employee trained and ready to go out to buy a home and giving them the resources they need. And they have opened that up to the community. It doesn’t just have to be their employees, but they have more

people wanting to buy them, they do houses. But they definitely try to make sure it’s a great fit to whom they sell the house to. And they do have some clawbacks in there because they’re doing a significant amount of work on this house and then selling it at a fair price. they’re putting them some, they have a lawyer that they work with that’s doing a pro bono. And they do put some things in there to have safety precautions so that the person doesn’t just turn around.

and sell it for twice the amount of money because that defeats the whole purpose. And it’s really about building a better community and rehabbing homes. Our community has been here for about 175 years and we traditionally haven’t had a lot of strategy around housing. So what’s created from that is we have blocks of neighborhoods that have abandoned housing and abandoned commercial properties. And so…

That’s where we’ve really tried to dig in and kind of create some strategy. And the cool thing is the municipalities have come along. And so now they’ve been the biggest cheerleaders and the biggest champions now. And it’s really created something special.

Brandon Burton (23:20.043)
So with the Nuisance Act, what sort of threshold is there for these vacant buildings to be able to qualify for the Nuisance Act or for you to be able to go after the owners of the building?

Econ Dev Ops is the virtual assistant service built specifically for small Chambers of Commerce and Economic Development Organizations (EDOs)

Natalie Hawn (23:29.954)
Yes. So this is still brand new. So we’re still writing the book on this chapter. We just got the legislation signed into law August 28th. So we’ve literally just created the Charitable Trust and the team that’s gonna kind of tackle this. So we’ll have to do another podcast to let you know how that unfolds. We kind of have our first building identified.

Brandon Burton (23:35.764)
Okay.

Brandon Burton (23:41.406)
Okay.

Natalie Hawn (23:58.318)
And, but we’re, we’re certainly still writing this chapter. It was more of an example of there’s so much that you can do to move the needle. And we’ve learned good and bad through all of these challenges, like, you know, the Abandoned Housing Act. I’m sure we’ll learn the same lessons through the Nuisance Act. So the Abandoned Housing Act, we learned the lesson that, and the group that does this high, I’m just a cheerleader for them.

I’m not a part of their organization. Most of them are on my board and they’re on our task force. But they learned the lesson that when they purchased, they went through all of the process to get the home, it abandons all of the liens that you have in the state, but it doesn’t forgive a federal lien. And they learned that lesson the hard way on their first home. And so you do learn lessons through these processes, but it’s been, it’s

It’s been a lot of fun and it’s really exciting. When we get to do the ribbon cutting on their first home, was probably the first ribbon cutting I’ve cried at. Because it’s just, we’re all kind of, we’ve identified this as a need in our community and we’re tackling it together. Business, community and community, it’s really cool.

Brandon Burton (25:14.001)
It changes lives and it can change lives for generations. So that is, that’s awesome. That is really cool.

Natalie Hawn (25:19.52)
Yeah, it’s been really cool.

Brandon Burton (25:21.973)
Yeah, so I love having these conversations about workforce housing because every chamber who has these difficult issues in their community to try to attack and try to find solutions to, they all come up with different answers. And to be able to share some of these ideas on the podcast, you know, the next chamber out there is going to have an amalgamation of what a few different chambers did to be able to come to certain answers. So being able to put these ideas out there and help other chambers

to really get their head wrapped around what is possible, what a chamber can do, and rallying the troops in the community, so to speak, be that convener. And you guys are moving the needle on making a huge impact in St. Joseph. So that’s awesome.

Natalie Hawn (26:08.664)
Yeah, thank you. I always say that the Chamber’s role, every community, I always say you’ve seen one Chamber, you’ve seen one Chamber, because the role of a Chamber is to be what their community needs them to be. And we tend to step in and serve the role to kind of facilitate solving that problem or being that convener, because Chambers are so positioned to be a convener.

So it doesn’t mean that we’ll always be the one leading the housing initiative or the task force. Once that problem starts to get some legs and really starts to head down a path that it’s gonna solve itself, then we’ll move on to the next challenge. But we find ourselves in the spaces that nobody else is at. If somebody else is already solving the problem, that’s awesome.

But it was one of those things that nobody was talking about housing, nobody was solving the problem. It was a true need for the business community. And I’ve had people, including our city manager say, why are you, he was branding, it was like, why are you doing the housing and stuff? And then he realized nobody else was. And I think that’s the role that Chambers, and it matters to this. And I think that’s the role that Chambers play. Like you can be such a convener to any issue that’s affecting your committee.

Brandon Burton (27:14.503)
And it matters to business. Yeah.

Natalie Hawn (27:25.112)
community if no one else is doing it. And you don’t have to do it forever. Be the champion, start the task force, create the conversation, create the data for the community, then start to watch it kind of evolve and then step out of the table and move on to the next issue. That’s the cool thing to me about Chambers.

Brandon Burton (27:45.473)
and see some of your board members spin up their own nonprofit to help solve the solution, right? Solve the answer, yeah. It’s awesome.

Natalie Hawn (27:51.758)
Isn’t that amazing? mean, and to me, it’s like, I just think that’s so cool. I mean, that’s what chamber boards should be doing. They shouldn’t be worried about, you know, really those day-to-day tasks about your event or micromanaging or what you are not doing. They should be solving problems like this. You know, I have four board members that have gone down and created a nonprofit to…

change our community and change the culture of their organizations because that creates, you know, just really lifelong champions for their organizations when you help somebody figure out how to buy a house. And they never thought that was going to ever be part of their story. So to me, that’s the role chambers should be doing. And that’s what they should be using their board for is how do you really make that radical change in your community? And you have those people that

the table with your board. So inspire them to do bigger things, not just come to the ribbon cutting. I need them at the ribbon cutting. I’d love them to be there. But when you have those thought leaders at the table, you can really, really make cool change happen.

Brandon Burton (29:01.729)
There’s bigger things to be done. Well, Natalie, as for listeners who are out there wanting to take their organization up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them, whether it’s related to this topic or something different altogether?

Natalie Hawn (29:19.47)
You know, I would say that never get too overwhelmed. The chamber world can be very overwhelming. I would lie to you if I told you there were days that I was overwhelmed. I tell my staff all the time, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. And so I think the cool thing about chambers is we can be the catalyst for change in our community.

So if you’re wanting to take your organization to the next level, of do that practice with either yourself, if you’re a one man chamber, the team, kind of find that space that your community really needs and your chamber really does well. And kind of put yourself through that exercise of how can we next level. And I’ll give you just a simple example. It can even be just in the area of…

kind of how do we make about our membership experience? even running, maybe it’s your board if you’re a one man chamber, or maybe it’s your staff if you have the ability to have staff. And maybe you just take the example of kind of your onboarding or your new member process and take it as simple as kind of running an exercise of your touch points and say, how are we, what is this experience like for our member when they try to join the chamber? Do they have?

Can they do it online? Do they have to come in? How complicated are we making it for them? And kind of put yourself through that whole even just new member experience and kind of talk through the touch points and even look at how can I and our team make these touch points easier. So if we’re requiring them to bring a check into the chamber, okay, do we have an online option? Do we take a credit card over the phone or do we tell them, sorry, I can’t take your credit card over the phone, you have to bring a check in?

You know, take some time, even if it’s just 10 minutes in a staff meeting or 10 minutes of your day to think through a process that your members, for the most part, touch every day and how to make that easier for them. Little things like that can take your chamber to the next level. It doesn’t have to be a huge daunting, how do we solve workforce housing problem? It can simply be as easy as how do we make

Natalie Hawn (31:39.89)
our new member or our bill paying experience for our members as hospitable as possible. How do we make our members feel seen and appreciated even if it’s through the bill paying process? So it can be as simple as that. You just, think if we, in Chamber World, we have to take time to slow down and make sure that we are making it a great experience for our members and our community. So everybody wants to be a part of it.

Brandon Burton (32:08.415)
And I’ll add to it that I think after going, you know, slowing down, thinking through those processes, doing what you can to improve upon them, to invite somebody who doesn’t really know anything about the chamber world to go through the process and see what is the user experience for somebody who doesn’t work at the chamber, who’s not thinking about these things all the time, because that’s where you’re really going to see those gaps that you need to close. So.

Natalie Hawn (32:20.354)
Yeah. Yeah!

Natalie Hawn (32:31.146)
And I think that is the smallest thing that you can do that can have the biggest impact on your organization. If you say, I’m going to quarterly take something that we know touches 99 % of our members, literally can be your dues renewal process. And we’re going to slow that down and look at the touch points and talk about how we can make that a better experience for everybody.

It can have huge change on your organization, doesn’t take a lot of time, and it’s an easy thing to do.

Brandon Burton (33:05.121)
Absolutely. Well, Natalie, I like asking everyone I have on the show about the future. So as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Natalie Hawn (33:17.024)
Okay, so I don’t know that I have the full answer to that obviously. ACCE has done some amazing stuff in their Horizon initiative that kind of outlines what Chambers should be looking at for the future. I will tell you guys, I don’t know, we’re gonna have to figure out from a Chamber perspective like us, how we’re gonna be utilizing.

AI because I think AI is going to be such a huge game changer for Chambers as well as like just society in general. So give me an example. So this is crazy to me. And then if and I was thinking about this, like how this could truly affect the business community because if it ends up affecting insurance, it’s going to affect all of us. But we were doing our health benefits analysis and maybe everybody knows this. This was new to me. I found out about this yesterday and I was blown away.

So we were doing our renewal. So we bid out our renewals every year. And we were bidding out our renewals and our guy brought our stuff in and he was like, okay, great news. We get to stay at this percentage point with your current provider. But I did go ahead and bid it out with other providers. And I bid it out with this new provider that’s on the scene, but they do all of your analysis through AI and the current providers don’t. And he said,

what I have to tell you and they give you like a full scorecard. He’s like, what I have to tell you is they didn’t accept your team. Like they wouldn’t, they won’t insure you guys. And I will tell you it’s because they take your credit card usage and they put it towards your health and wellness. So for example, I for a lot of parties for the chamber. I bought a lot of margaritas. They think I’m an alcoholic.

Brandon Burton (35:05.728)
Hahaha!

Natalie Hawn (35:09.174)
So I was like, this is a problem. So they wouldn’t insure us because they saw the medicines we pay for out of pocket. So it outed anybody on my team that’s on Ozempic. it also, it like, I was like, I felt very seen and heard by AI that I’m like, okay, it thinks that we’re not appropriate here because we’re buying all this alcohol. But they don’t know, but the disconnect with AI is they didn’t look to see, it’s a chamber. They throw a lot of parties.

Brandon Burton (35:30.751)
That’s funny.

Brandon Burton (35:36.521)
It didn’t have the context, yeah.

Natalie Hawn (35:38.146)
They didn’t have the context. And so that’s just one example, though. If you think about how businesses are going to start to use AI, chambers are going to have to play a role in that because that could revolutionize how the bidding processes for benefits come down in the future for insurance. And that could affect your small businesses. That could affect your chambers. I mean, they denied us. And luckily, our current plan doesn’t look at my credit card spending.

But I think it’s a good example of the reality of that in all seriousness is I think that we’re, even if it’s scary, we’re all going to have to figure out the role that the chambers are going to play in AI and technology. And I think the ones that figure it out are going to be a little more successful than the ones who don’t.

Brandon Burton (36:27.697)
And I’ve mentioned this comment, I feel like every episode, the last few episodes, but we need to make sure that chambers are transparent, that they use AI too, because your members are trying to figure out how to implement AI in their own business. And as a chamber, if they can look to you as a thought leader and you’re using AI, and if you’re trying to hide it, they don’t see you as being relevant. They don’t see you as recognizing what the real implementations are in the business environment.

Natalie Hawn (36:57.494)
Right, not to mention that, you know, they, it just makes your life so much easier. So they’re, you know, if you’re not using it and you’re not really trying to be efficient with it, then I think you have to, you know, you have to take a hard look. Cause we don’t do minutes anymore for like board meetings. I mean, it’s just, it has given us so much time back. So I think we have a responsibility then to teach our members how to do it and not be afraid of it. And, you know, think.

creatively about tools like Pacer AI and how can we use Pacer AI for our small businesses that can’t afford marketing research. I I think we have a responsibility as business leaders for Chambers to educate our businesses on how to use it, especially our small businesses that don’t have time to figure out how to use AI. I do think that’s where the future is headed and I think we have a responsibility.

Brandon Burton (37:47.743)
And.

Brandon Burton (37:51.935)
And this is the opportunity for small businesses to really take advantage if they can be guided in the right direction to really make a difference for their business. So, yeah. So I love that insight. Thank you for that. Natalie, before we wrap up, 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 the approach you guys are taking there in St. Joseph. Where would you point them and how should they reach out and connect with you?

Natalie Hawn (37:58.228)
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

Natalie Hawn (38:17.623)
Yeah. You can find us at stjoseph.com. You have to spell that out. I say I-N-T, joseph.com. And all of my contact information is on our website.

Brandon Burton (38:28.747)
Perfect. We’ll have that in our show notes to make it nice and easy to find. this has been a great conversation, Natalie. Thank you for spending time with us today on Chamber Chat podcast and diving into some of these difficult problems that you guys are striving to solve and making some great headway with. I appreciate it.

Natalie Hawn (38:32.854)
Awesome!

Natalie Hawn (38:46.54)
Yeah. Thank you. Really appreciate it.

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AI in Action: Transforming Chambers Today with Craig Turner

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Brandon Burton (00:00.94)
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. Today’s guest is a true game changer at the intersection of business growth, AI innovation, and Chamber of Commerce strategy.

Craig Turner is the founder and president of Momentum, the business growth agency, Momentum for Chambers, and Momentum AI. With Momentum celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2024, Craig and his team have become known for revolutionizing the way Chambers of Commerce and small businesses drive ROI through innovative sponsorship strategies, ambassador training, and powerful member benefit programs.

But Craig isn’t just building bridges between businesses and chambers. He’s also on the leading edge of the AI revolution. A dynamic speaker and in-demand consultant, Craig delivers practical, accessible, and fun AI trainings that demystify tech use for every day. Earlier this year, he launched MemberBoost AI, a game-changing platform helping chambers deliver custom AI-generated growth strategies to their members.

In addition to his work with Momentum, Craig currently serves as the interim executive director of the Niagara USA Chamber of Commerce, providing that when it comes to empowering businesses, he’s not just talking the talk, but he’s walking the walk.

Craig, I’m excited to have you back with us here on Chamber Chat podcast. It was just over a year ago, we had you on before. For those who want to go back and check that episode out, was episode 295, where we also talked about AI.

Brandon Burton (01:50.22)
But I wanted to give you an opportunity today to just say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening. It’s always fun to get that interesting tidbit about somebody. So if you’ve got something interesting about yourself you’d like to share, we’d be happy to hear it.

Craig Turner (02:05.517)
Absolutely Brandon. Well, thanks so much again for having me back on. You know, what’s interesting is we, was just about a year ago, but so much has changed. mean, we’re going to talk about AI in both, there’s two completely different conversations because everything’s moving so quickly. Interesting tidbit about me. I’ve got a little more than 20 years experience in the chambers and I’ve been on all sides of it. So I’ve been an executive, I’ve been a staffer, I’ve been a member, I’ve been a board member, I’ve been a board chair. I’ve done it all.

Brandon Burton (02:18.371)
right?

Craig Turner (02:35.309)
every piece of the puzzle, but I just the tidbit about me that I want to share I’m such a Chamber of Commerce nerd that I actually have published a book and it’s the first in a series called the Chamber of Commerce mysteries. It’s murder mystery set in the Chamber of Commerce environment and book number two is actually almost done and coming shortly too so I’m excited about that. So that’s how much I’ve dived into the chamber world.

Brandon Burton (03:01.262)
I love it. So book one was great. So I’m looking forward to book two. And for those who haven’t checked it out yet, it’s great. I love that the setting is a chamber of commerce that kind of focuses around the story, just kind of revolves around a local chamber. So I love it. I’d love to see that integrated more into our daily activities and entertainment.

So typically at this point in these podcast interviews, I’d like to have the guests tell about their chamber size, staff scope of work, budget, kind of set that perspective. I think it would be important to kind of get the little bit more background about momentum and in just a couple of minutes, but then also tell us about the Niagara USA chamber size, staff scope of work, just so we know what kind of resources you’re coming from as you’re applying some of these AI tools at the organization.

Craig Turner (03:55.656)
Absolutely. Well, they go hand in hand. What’s very interesting. so, working for the chamber, you know, 15 years ago, the regional chamber here in Buffalo, part of, I ran government affairs, but my part of my, my job was what we call business development, which was not, not sales, not membership sales, but business development for our members. And this was back during the recession and our board to their credit said, we’re going to start losing members because the good corporate citizen thing.

is going to start to be a question when someone’s going to say, just fired my marketing manager. Why am I giving the chamber $1,500? So we put together a team of seven people and we met with 400 companies during the great recession back in 2009, 2010. And part of what you needed to do was you needed to meet with them and you needed to come back to the office with three things you could do for them. Specifically, not go to this event, just specifically for them. We had an 88 % retention rate during the

during the Great Recession. So when I left the Chamber ultimately, I took that concept and built it into my business. So Momentum, what we do before AI, what we do is our clients are companies that join Chambers of Commerce. And we’re kind of the Jerry McGuire for them. We’re the agent. We tell them what Chambers to join, where to spend money. We get speaking roles for them. Even on a day-to-day basis, what events people should go to.

And to this day, I haven’t found anybody that competes with us. So we’re gonna keep on, we’re gonna keep on doing that. But then the chamber started to see what we were doing and come to us and say, hey, we really like what you’re saying on LinkedIn on member value. Would you like to come consult with us? And me being an entrepreneur, I’m like, of course, I don’t know what it looks like, but what we can. So next thing you know, I have momentum for business, momentum for chambers. And we taught the way we talk about it, we exist in the gray area between.

Brandon Burton (05:39.074)
Right?

Craig Turner (05:48.706)
between the two, helping both sides have a better relationship. November 2022, OpenAI makes CHAT GPT available. And the first thing I’m gonna dive in, we’re gonna grow our company and we’re gonna, the promise we made to this chamber network that we’ve built is look, we know you don’t have time to sit on top of this stuff all day. We’re gonna do it. We’re gonna learn everything we can. We’re gonna curate the best stuff.

And we’re going to, we’re going to train you. we’ve trained more than 1500 chambers since, since that time, uh, around the country and we’re excited and we love doing it. We love building these relationships. know the same way, same, way you love building these relationships through the podcast. Um, so I belong to the Niagara USA chamber for, uh, uh, you know, for, for about eight years, been on the board for a long time. And I was the chair last year, our executive director stepped on earlier this year and the board said,

Craig, this is what you do. Do you want to take the reins in the interim and kind of build a foundation for us? So that’s where we are right now. The Niagara USA Chamber, we represent all of Niagara County, which obviously if you look behind me includes Niagara Falls. are not, like some of our colleagues, we are not a tourism chamber. We have a really, really great tourism agency that we work with. But we are, for the most part, in the advocacy chamber.

know, New York state is a tough place to do business and there’s consistently more and more regulation. And right now we’re dealing with big time energy issues as they’re trying to completely eliminate natural gas. So we’re in the thick of that, but we’re also a community chamber, a small business chamber. we work hard at building that community. have, you know, just coming up in about a month or so as our small business expo.

We have 480 members you were talking about member size 480 members across the county and The one thing I’ll say about our thing and I don’t think it were abnormal to chambers, but it’s a very diverse membership from the perspective of you know urban suburban and and rural most of the matter County is rural and We do as much agribusiness as we do City Main Street kind of advocacy. So so there’s there’s your rundown of the two, you know momentum and how they kind of

Craig Turner (08:10.327)
how they kind of work together. What we do love though is as we do these trainings for AI, we’re using AI with the chamber. So when I tell you that this prompt will work or this tool will work, we’ve already used it. We’ve already used it in the real world. that’s exciting to have a little sandbox to be able to do these things.

Brandon Burton (08:30.262)
Right. And as we talked today, I almost wish that we could be in front of a live audience to be able to get feedback and have people raise their hands and who’s tried this or that and to kind of course, know, or steer the course for our conversation today. But I think there’s a we both have had a lot of interactions with chambers across the country to kind of get a good feel of how they’re using AI or not.

Craig Turner (08:43.949)
Yes.

Brandon Burton (08:53.928)
And I think we can use that kind of as a base for our discussion today. our focus is going to be on what’s working in AI here. As this releases, it’ll be November 2025. like you mentioned, this is three years since Chat GPT rolled out.

to the masses. So we’ll see how things have evolved and what’s working for Chambers today when it comes to AI. And we’ll dive into that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Craig, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re diving into AI. And specifically, I’d like to know, as you see, as you’ve applied AI, as you’ve done trainings on AI, what’s working with AI? What’s really moving the needle for Chambers? Maybe some of those key prompts or exercises or, mean, prompt is such a good word because it covers so much from what you actually give the AI to do.

but also what you want that end result to be. But what are you seeing? What’s working?

Craig Turner (10:01.293)
So the time saving is the thing that most people have latched on to. Whether you’re talking about Chambers or their members. Knowing that you can do your blogs, can do your social media, a lot of writing. People understand that. So like when we do trainings, no, we don’t focus on that as much because most people know that they can do that. What we emphasize is what it’s actually accomplishing in the real world. What are you doing with that time savings?

There’s a delineation. We talk about this from the perspective of… People talk about AI is going to take jobs away. right, is AI going to take your job? And we always look at that in two ways. Are you using it as a crutch or are you using it as a tool? So the time savings, and we emphasize this every single time we talk to somebody, a crutch means I have a list of things on my to-do list, I’m using AI to get rid of them, and then I’m on to the next thing. A tool is…

I am using AI to enhance everything I’m doing to make it better so that we’re getting more registrations to our mats, we’re bringing in more new members, we’re getting better, a higher renewal rate, our emails are being read, those kind of things. So it’s the, it’s that purpose of what you’re doing. I see hit or miss around, around the country there. There are, there are a lot, everybody knows copywriting. That’s the easy thing. I see a lot of chambers using it for copywriting and that’s great. It does save time, but you have to make sure that you’re

you’re using it to do better. And when you talk about AI replacing jobs, I always say, look, if you’re using AI just to take the things off your to-do list, eventually your boss doesn’t need to pay you to do that because AI can do it. They can do it themselves. If you’re using it to enhance yourself, there’s no gray area in between. If you’re using it to enhance your work, guess what? Now you’ve made yourself super marketable, not only in your own organization, but elsewhere. That’s one thing that I’ve seen is that

Some chambers have taken on AI and gotten some good stuff done because one person was interested in it. That person becomes marketable. They leave the chambers back at square one again. And that’s a tough place to be. But I’m seeing some really great things happening around the country. I’m seeing chambers use it for, you know, again, to enhance their writing in their newsletters to make them stronger. I’m seeing it for…

Craig Turner (12:26.237)
Database cleanup is huge. I’m seeing it for a strategy, strategy, which is one thing that we emphasize. Yeah, for people to use and say, look, I have this idea, help me flesh out this idea, help me build a six month plan, ask me questions, play my devil’s advocate. These are the kinds of things that I think are starting to get in. We emphasize again, not just using it to save time, but

Brandon Burton (12:33.806)
That’s what I really like, yeah.

Craig Turner (12:54.771)
integrating it into your operation so that it becomes actually a way of life for you.

Brandon Burton (13:00.302)
Yeah, I can see as far as the, you know, getting the ideas, the strategy. I mean, when was the last time as a chamber that you’ve looked at your onboarding messaging? You know, was that pre AI? Has it been post AI? I mean, that is a simple idea of how you can really utilize it. And I would say whatever AI gives you, don’t just take it, make it, take the idea and then, you know, customize it, make it yours. So it sounds like you and Craig, you’d put a post

I think it was on LinkedIn a week or two ago where you talked about one of these tells, you know, as you see an AI post. You want to talk about what that is and maybe people can kind of look for that in languaging when they’re using AI for their social media posts or newsletters.

Craig Turner (13:49.514)
Sure, absolutely. That was a fun post. Yeah. So there’s this thing out there now where people say, I could tell if it’s written with AI. When, you know, my AI was so trained, I tell them my AI is so trained, you’ll never know. It’s so trained on me. But you can tell there are things. So a couple things people talk about the hyphen, you know, and if you cut and paste something right out of AI into LinkedIn or your newsletter, there’s going to be that big hyphen in there. People are going to know. The other one, the tell that I said on LinkedIn is

AI loves the, this isn’t this, it’s this. It loves that format. you know, yeah, yeah. So our, so Monday’s Thursday’s business after five mixer isn’t, you know, isn’t just a networking event. It’s a game changer, you know, and that’s how, that’s how it’s in almost everyone. And you can see it. And the thing is, I said this, you might not have seen it Brandon, but, it was on a comment on someone else’s post is, is that okay?

Brandon Burton (14:25.144)
The comparison, yeah.

Craig Turner (14:47.969)
Well, it depends on your audience. If your audience is fine with it, then it doesn’t matter. That’s fine. But if your audience are going to see that you are, you know, is going to feel one way or another about you using AI to do stuff, well, that’s something you have to take into consideration. yeah, there are, you can tell. And to your point, you never want to just let the AI just run with it and go. That’s one of the things that I talk about. Interesting. It’s a good segue to something like a chatbot. All right. So.

If you have a WordPress or a Wix website, sometimes there’s a plug-in you can put a chatbot on your homepage. I always caution against this and the reason I caution against this is because it’s not necessarily implemented correctly. Because think about it, if somebody comes to your homepage, your first interaction with that person is going to be, you’re just going to turn that right over to AI. People don’t realize that when you do a chatbot, if you really want to do a chatbot, so you go to your electric company or whatever, there’s a chatbot.

The chat bot is backed up by 3000 possible different answers, right? Thousands of answers. The AI goes in there and picks the right answer. It’s not just this random AI is just going to give an answer. It goes into the data that you’ve already, that you’ve already updated. And the best example of that to me, it was always Siri. You could ask Siri all kinds of stuff on your phone, but what happens if Siri didn’t have the answer? That she just sent you to Google, right? And that’s a great example of it. So.

Brandon Burton (16:12.654)
Yeah.

Craig Turner (16:17.409)
So you you don’t want the AI to just take the wheel. We always say you like to have the human have one hand on the wheel. All right. So don’t just pull out an AI, cut and paste it and send. You want to read it, you want to edit it, you want to make sure it’s still in your voice. then you don’t have to worry about those towels.

Brandon Burton (16:34.368)
Right, yeah. And to your point, I think there’s times where it’s OK to have the tells. And when you look at the business community at large, businesses are looking for ways to implement AI. So if they can see that their local chamber, who’s supporting business, is also utilizing and embracing and implementing AI,

I think that’s important. if you’re a chamber out there and you’re trying to hide the fact that you’re using AI, I think you’re probably doing a disservice to your organization. I don’t know if you have similar thoughts.

Craig Turner (17:05.069)
I do, I absolutely do. So if you follow me on LinkedIn, and I hope you will because I’m doing AI tips just about every day, but I use AI images every day. And for me, it was always about stock photos because I always tried to have an image with my post, but stock photos to me were always search for 45 minutes to find a picture that is kind of what I needed, but not exactly. With AI, I can do

Anything I want, can make exactly the picture that I want and add it to my post. But I don’t hide that I’m using AI photos. mean, they’re obviously AI photos. What did I do? What did I do early that they were recording earlier today? I took Brandon’s logo and I had my little robot walk across the front of it. It’s obviously AI. So, and to your point about the chamber and the community showing that they’re using AI, demonstrating some validity in it.

Brandon Burton (17:43.596)
Right.

Craig Turner (18:01.213)
I believe in it I, this, I I’m not going to say I train this. I’m going to say I preach this. Your chamber needs to be front and center on AI because everyone, because it’s so game changing. The last thing you want is. So, you know, a small business, you know, I gave you $250 for the membership. I’m trying to figure out what I get out of that membership. And then the community college or another group down the road holds an AI training for 30 bucks. They go to it.

changes their world. It completely changes their business. And then they start going, why didn’t the chamber give me that information? It is imperative that you take the reins in your community and be the AI for business leadership.

Brandon Burton (18:42.42)
Absolutely. So I know there’s been several ways that I’ve implemented AI into my daily practices and even into the podcast. So before we hit record, I told Craig, I have all the guest share a bio with me that I can use to introduce them on the show. And I’ve created a custom GPT saying, here’s the bio for Craig. And I want you to make this into a podcast introduction. So it’ll kind of massage the introduction and

bring out those key points that are relevant to the podcast.

another one that, so when you talk about time saver, so I think that’s an enhancement, you know, to as far as the bios go, as far as a time saver goes, even the platform that I use to record the podcast on and I’ll, I’ll plug it. It’s called riverside, but I’ve been using it for a couple of months now. And what it does is it seamlessly, it works a lot like zoom as far as what you see on a video call, but for pod

podcast production, it has AI embedded in it all over. So before I would have to record on Zoom, I would have to export that into another program called Audacity, do all the audio balancing, and have to then take it to the hosting site that I had everything to upload the podcast to. And so it was time, each of those things was costing money. And then now with Riverside, I go into it, we’ll have this recording. I already have predefined settings.

So I’m going to go into, you know, a few minutes after this recording is finished and it’s going to have a made for you section that has the video. It has the audio, all the audio balancing is done. I can export it for an audio podcast, a video podcast. It’ll create shorts, you know, short videos for reels and tick tock and things like that. so it’s a, it’s a cost savings and it’s a time savings while enhancing what I’m doing. So it’s, it’s a game.

Brandon Burton (20:46.384)
just to implement AI into our daily activities. So what are some of the big things that you’ve actually implemented there at the Niagara USA Chamber? There’s a couple of things that I’ve seen that you’ve done, but what are some of those things that stand top of mind to you that other chambers could really benefit from?

Craig Turner (21:10.167)
Well, the hallmark is our email newsletter open rate. So I came in and the database is a little bit of a disaster. again, I don’t think we’re abnormal to that. Even before AI, I said, look, I would give presentations and I’d say, once every two years, get an intern to come in and just go through every member in your database and check their contact information. So I came in and we had…

We had about a 34 % open rate on emails, which isn’t, you know, it’s not the end of the world. It’s not bad. It’s industry standard. So I began using AI to do a couple things. One, to clean up the database. So that’s a project that’s still ongoing to the point where it’s going so well that I actually am creating a tool that will, you know, will make available to other chambers at some point. It’s actually close to being done and it’s exciting. But

But using AI to clean up the database, get as close as we can to the right contact person, that foundational piece is so important. again, it was a lesson to me because AI was always like, you would always say, it helped me save two hours. It was always like the metric. helped me save two hours. It helped me save this amount of time. For this project, it…

I changed my talking points. Now I say, I can’t even give you the number of hours. It saved me because I never would have started this project without AI. Right? So the foundation of cleaning the database has, has done a couple things. One, now I know who to send the email to two. Now I know who’s supposed to get the invoice, the renewal invoice in the first place, instead of it just going into the ether. So there was one part of it. Then the second part was

is something that we call audit, which is optimizing your communication. So it’s not just having AI write for you, it’s optimizing. So, and it’s, I use that word purpose, which is very important. So when we do a newsletter or a LinkedIn post, you might say, write me, you know, here’s our event coming up, write me the blurb for this. And people stop there. But what you need to say is we are looking to drive registrations. We are looking to send people to the website. We are looking to have people write a letter to the governor.

Craig Turner (23:33.166)
What is your purpose for doing that? And that’s going to enhance the way that the copy comes out and what you’re going to put in your newsletter. The other thing with the newsletters is, and this is where AI comes in very handy again, a lot of this is, you know, a lot of it is people don’t feel like they’re, you know, a lot of the opposition is I don’t want to turn all these things over to AI. I’m turning things over to a computer. You’re not.

What you’re doing is now you have access to all of the knowledge that’s on the internet at the same time instead of having to figure out how to ask for it yourself. What I always say is when it comes to LinkedIn, Facebook, Axe, emails, AI knows more about the algorithms than you do. So, spam email. You can write the most beautiful, prettiest, you can have your list cleaned up, you can write the most beautiful newsletter if there are triggers that spam filters go for.

Alright and they’re not always seen especially for chambers so exclamation points. If you have exclamation points throughout your newsletter it’s going to the spam for the tougher spam filters are going to are going to pick it up. Chamber of Commerce how about this free free event the word free will trigger your spams filters alright so you want to do your events at no cost to members.

complimentary to members. Don’t use the word free because it’s going to get that. So by cleaning up the database and optimizing the newsletters and the LinkedIn posts to hit the algorithms the right way, we’re averaging around 55 % open rate right now. Which again, is a number on paper. Here’s the thing that happens in real life.

We just had our launch yesterday. I know we’re releasing this in November, but yesterday we had one of our launches and it’s the third out of the last four that we had to close registration because we were sold out. All right. So why are we selling out? Because people now are opening the newsletters and claiming that we’re actually having an event so they can come to it. So this is where you take the…

Brandon Burton (25:35.394)
They’re saying, how come the chamber never emailed me before?

Craig Turner (25:38.542)
Yeah, how could they never email? Weren’t they doing anything before? And the bars in the community about what we’re doing is hot right now, which is excellent. So that AI work, behind the scenes and then out front, and then it was less about time savings and more about let’s make this work. And again, you build a relationship with your chat GPT, but I’ve told chat GPT every time I…

newsletter I’m like I want this one to hit 60 % like that’s my goal is there 60 so we’ve got enough to 57 % on one of our newsletters I want 60 so I’m gonna keep working on these things keep optimizing but that’s kind of a that’s kind of the hallmark thing that we’ve been able to to go to I will the other one I’ll say small business expo the event we have our second one coming up shortly last year the entire event was designed by AI I didn’t tell anybody that until that day

until the day of the event, but the event started with me saying, opening ChatGPT and saying, I want to put on a small business expo, right? Built the whole thing on AI, implemented it, got it all ready to go. All the advertising was AI. I did it intentionally to see if we could do it, but, and then that day I revealed to everybody, hey, everything that you’re seeing around you today was built by AI. so those are, yeah, so those are two real good examples of, of,

Brandon Burton (26:56.748)
and made it real. Yeah.

Craig Turner (27:03.231)
of what we’re doing, but I say it often, there’s no way I could run my company and a chamber at the same time without AI. It just couldn’t happen. So five years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to take this role, but now we can do it and we’re getting some real good stuff done. And my goal is to, with the chamber, again, I’m an interim when I pass it off and when we hire the second person,

We want to have AI taking care of a lot of the admin stuff and things like that so that when we do hire somebody again, we can focus on business development. You know, we don’t need somebody sitting at the front desk doing data entry. We want to focus on somebody out there talking to members and that’s the goal here. That’s the real world goal here is I was talking about repurposed it there. So I use the AI to write my social media and only takes me 15 minutes instead of an hour and a half. Well, what are you doing with that time that you just recaptured?

Are you using it to generate revenue or are you standing at the water cooler talking about the football game? You need to have that strategy intact that if I save time here, that’s going to go into revenue generation. And that goes for businesses too. Same thing, same thing.

Brandon Burton (28:03.926)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (28:14.796)
Yeah. So your thoughts on the prompt for expressing what the purpose is, like specifically with this newsletter and the purpose to drive registration. That brings up the next question that I had on my mind is the quality of the prompts that you give to the AI model versus the limits of what AI can do. I know I’ve had ideas and I’ve tried to get AI to do something and

Craig Turner (28:34.807)
Yeah. Yeah.

Brandon Burton (28:45.481)
And sometimes I think maybe I need a better quality prompt. And sometimes I think maybe this is beyond the limits of what this AI model can do at the moment. So can you help us navigate that between the limits of AI and the quality of the prompts?

Craig Turner (29:03.351)
Sure, sure, absolutely. I will tell you what’s one of the funny things is, well people will, you know, when I do my training sometimes and I’ll make a point of it, my prompt sometimes is longer than the response I get because I know exactly what I want. And what’s neat, if you haven’t played with video yet, Sora came out and Grok has a great video and now Google just yesterday came out with their, you know, their enhanced video. The video will really teach you how to prompt because it picks up on every little word and it…

you if you want it to be right, you got to kind of have it the way you need it. But let me talk about the limits first, and then I’ll go into the prompts. So when I do the conferences, whether it’s a chamber conference or something else, a lot of the times, again, it’s not me, but it’s AI, because AI is such a hot topic, the conference organizers will put me first. All right. Start with a bang, know, start with AI, you know, crazy. For the rest of the conference. Yes.

Brandon Burton (29:57.09)
gets people there on time.

Craig Turner (30:00.044)
Yeah, some people sometimes they put me at the end so that people don’t leave in the morning. You know, it’s kind of it’s a strategy. I get it. But some if I go first for the rest of the conference, anything that comes up, anything, someone will make the joke and slap me on the arms. Hey, Craig, can I do that? And my answer is always it can. I mean, depends on what you want to pay to do it. I mean, your chat, you may be able to do it. So there’s like a there’s like a hierarchy, you know.

Brandon Burton (30:03.849)
Stay. Yeah.

Craig Turner (30:28.045)
And most of us, can sit in front of our chat GBT and do all kinds of great stuff. You talked about creating a GPT. That’s the next step where you’re creating an automation that kind of 30, 40, 50 % of the work is already done. All you have to do is input the data. From there, you kind of have to move into actual programming. And you could do all the things, but the key to AI is the data that you’re putting into it. And if you don’t have the data, you have to get the data.

So programming will start to do that and we’ve got you should see I got code all over my screens here now but so the limits are Murky, I mean you can really kind of do almost anything you want Which is which is very cool. And sometimes you just go to your change of routines. I want to do this and see what happens The prompt yes, is the prompt, you know taking the prompt to

to make it do what you want to do is a skill. I mean, there’s a reason people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this stuff, working for bigger companies, is because there is a skill to it. But I always talk about it’s the, know, for chamber people, give them, I think people know the what. I need a blog about community service. They know the how. I want it to be a thousand words and have a tone, you know, written for busy professional, busy small business people.

But the why is the big thing is why am I doing this? What am I trying to accomplish here? The neat thing about AI is you don’t have to restate your question. can say, no, I really wanted it to do this. I really wanted to do this. Change this sentence for me. But, you know, so you can get to that perfect prompt eventually, but people don’t. I mean, that’s what they’re trying to encourage them to do. But that first prompt is this is what, you know, is going to set you on the right course.

One little trick that you can actually do is you can ask your AI, whichever platform you use, to write the prompt for you. Here’s what I’m trying to accomplish in real life. Can you write the prompt for me to do that? What I like, I’m a chat GBT guy and the thing I like about chat GBT is the voice. I’m constantly talking to chat GBT. This is how I spend my time in the car on road trips, doing all strategy and whatever the case may be.

Craig Turner (32:52.129)
is with the voice, you can just brain dump. This is what I want to accomplish. Just ramble, complain, do whatever you got to do, put it in there and then say, write me the prompt to get me where I need to be. And you’ll be so far ahead just because again, like I said, the data is the most important point. Complaining to your AI is data. You’re giving it data and complaining sometimes is the best kind of data because you’re using all the keywords and you just rant and you just keep going. And then you ask for the

Summary of what you said and and it’ll do it so so that’s a little trick is if you’re you know to make your prompt better You can ask AI to write it the other thing you can do is if you aren’t even sure you know You know you have to get something done. You aren’t sure you tell AI Interview me ask me questions ask me questions. We got it. Here’s where I’m trying to get I don’t know where to start ask me questions to pull everything out of my brain And then we’re gonna write the prompt after that so there’s a couple there’s a couple different ways you can

you can get at it to strengthen your props. Somebody at one of the chambers the other day said, cause I did a sprint. I do a lot of the trainings, which are an hour long training and they’ve been everything from, you know, one-on-one to advanced trainings. But I did a sprint lately, which was two weeks intensive, three sessions. And it was focused on automations.

Automations, GPTs and projects. One session of each. And the goal was, it wasn’t about me giving you a prompt and showing you how it works on a screen. It was me giving you a prompt that you can customize to your own chamber of commerce. I’m sorry, it wasn’t chamber, it was small businesses. It was small businesses, but it’s integration. What we did was we got 10 chambers to send us 10 companies each. It worked very well, but it was about integration because so many times people go to these one hour trainings, they leave.

They opened their email, they got 35 emails, they get busy. I see them six months later and they’re like, oh, I loved your training, but I just haven’t gotten to it. So the sprint was designed to take you to the next level. Look, while you’re sitting here in front of me, you’re going to integrate it into your, into your business. And it worked really well. It was, it was, it was an exercise, but it worked. It worked really, really well.

Brandon Burton (35:07.086)
That’s a great idea. So you mentioned that the GPTs are kind of the next level after prompting and then coding after that. Were you a coder before you had access to AI?

Craig Turner (35:19.831)
So I’m one of these guys that has an interest in coding. So back in the 80s, I learned how to use a couple of different coding things. And I would just play with it. So I learned how to use the periodic table back in the 80s for chemistry class by coding myself a quiz. And I just quizzed myself on all the elements and everything. So yeah, nerdy. So when I started

Brandon Burton (35:40.705)
Okay.

Craig Turner (35:46.37)
doing all the training and everything. went back to this whole thing, this relationship between the, the chamber and its members. And I’m like, okay, we’re doing well, but it’s me driving around the country, doing all this stuff. said, I need to figure out a way to scale this. So I started to, look at that and I created what’s called member boost AI, which is a, a platform where, where members chamber member chamber subscribes.

Members can go onto the onto the platform, enter some information about themselves. And when they hit submit, they get a customized strategy on how to use that their membership, how to best use and get ROI from their membership with that chamber, not just any chamber. I’ve got it trained on the chamber. I got it trained on the chamber to the point where it says. It doesn’t say go to a business after five event. It says go to the business after five event on November 14th and, and,

Brandon Burton (36:27.47)
okay.

Craig Turner (36:41.165)
You know, gives you elevator pitch. gives you all kinds of stuff. It’s, it’s, it’s actually very cool, but it’s what, it’s what I do in real. It’s what I do in real life, but now it’s automated into AI. So more, more chambers can do it. But I tell you that because when I started that project, um, I told a colleague of mine, said, I think I can code 90 % of it. And then I need to, uh, probably get some, some help after that. I blew right through it with, with, you know, AI coding capabilities, as long as you understand the logic.

Brandon Burton (37:09.432)
Yeah.

Craig Turner (37:11.047)
it, yeah, you, can get everything done and it turned out very well, but now I’m, now I’m out of control. get it. have a new idea every, every other day. I’m like, so the, the Gen Z years have come up with a phrase called vibe coding, which I love vibe coding. have an idea. I sit down and I code it. I’m actually, I’m actually going to teach that at our small business expo, in November. just a little 15 minute session on vibe coding, but like I teach my kids to try to do it too. I’m like,

Brandon Burton (37:23.756)
Yeah, yeah.

Craig Turner (37:39.618)
I’m like, this is going to be an important skill. again, starting with AI, we’re not trying to put a man on Mars. We’re not trying to cure cancer. Make me, know, code me something that will roll a pair of dice for me. All right. And just put it up there. Just code it. See how it comes up and see what, you know, see, and then you build off of that. So I, I’ll tell you, I coded a, I did for LinkedIn just for some content. I needed some content. I was thinking about over the weekend. This is, I don’t know, back in May or so.

Brandon Burton (37:58.412)
Yeah.

Craig Turner (38:09.837)
I’m like, okay, I’m gonna give myself a challenge. I want to code a five question trivia quiz and I want it to be graphical so I have it look like it’s on an iPhone and it came out and I did Chamber of Commerce trivia. All right. I put it up on LinkedIn and I wanted to I wanted it to say, okay, you got three out of five, correct? But I said I want to do the whole thing in less than ten minutes. That’s my goal for this thing. So I vibe coded this thing.

It was great content. got so many views. People were emailing me and saying, I only got three out of five. I guess I need to learn my chambers of commerce. But then I didn’t do anything with it. So a couple of weeks ago, I’m on a hike talking to Chet Chibuti in my ears. And I’m like, OK, I need something like just a wow people with some of these chamber leaders. And I’m going back and forth. Chet Chibuti is giving me ideas. And I’m like, no, that takes too much time. No, it’s not personalized enough.

And Chatchabeechee actually said to me, what about that trivia quiz? And I’m like, well, what about it? He said, well, you can repurpose that platform. I’m like, my goodness. So I have this thing. It’s done. I keep pointing at my screen. It’s right here. It’s done. It’s ready to go. And it’s going to roll out probably before this podcast is aired. But I’m excited about it. It was an experiment. that’s what happens. You do one thing.

And then you’re like, well, if I could do that, then I could do this. Oh, then I could do this. Then I could do that. And next thing you know, you’re deep into code. But it’s exciting.

Brandon Burton (39:38.444)
Yeah, yeah.

Well, and I know, I mean, I don’t have the coding background, but as I’ve come across different projects and trying to implement different automations and it’ll, it’ll walk you through step by step with like a Google app script or something like that, or just basic coding that you could embed into a custom GPT and things like that. So,

Craig Turner (40:01.134)
Yeah. When you’re, and you’re right about GPT’s, GPT’s are such a powerful, powerful tool because you really can, you can build what you want using natural language and you don’t have to, you don’t have to know anything about coding. I created one when I started this, I said, what is the, you know, okay, so we’re entrepreneurs. We want to solve problems. What is the biggest pain in the butt thing for a chamber, for chamber staff meeting minutes?

So I created a GPT that does all you have to You can actually take a picture of your notes, put it in, and it’ll write the meeting minutes for you. And the GPT store gives you stats, and that one’s just been used so much because it’s so easy. We hit on it. And that’s free. It’s in the GPT store. free. And it’ll save you all the headache of meeting minutes, which is the absolute worst thing ever.

Brandon Burton (40:52.59)
That’s right. Well, Craig, before I let you go, our time has gone super fast as it does. But I always like to get a good tip or action item for listeners who want to take their organization up to the next level. What would you suggest for those listening?

Craig Turner (40:59.466)
It does, it does.

Craig Turner (41:10.061)
I’m going to say, and I’ll simplify what we normally say, is use AI with purpose. Find a reason that you’re using it and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Find a task, and this is something you could do today. Find a task that you have to do. You can’t avoid as a chamber of commerce, and there are lots of them, we know, and see if you can get AI to get rid of 50 % of that task for you.

Automate some of it whether it’s meeting minutes or whether it’s member outreaches or whatever the case may be Keep the human involved but try take one task and try and see if you can get AI to get to do 50 % of the work for you And you’ll be you’ll be well if you can do that. You’ll be well on your way

Brandon Burton (41:52.11)
It’s a great challenge. So hopefully everybody’s listening and saying challenge accepted, you know, try it out. Well, Craig, I always like asking everyone I have on the show about the future of Chambers. How do you see the future of Chambers and their purpose going forward?

Craig Turner (41:53.825)
Yeah. Yeah.

Craig Turner (42:09.099)
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. The main thing that I see, again, we’ve kind of dedicated ourselves to using AI to do it, is I feel like chambers are going to need to have a more intimate relationship with their members going forward. I think the chambers that do that are the ones that are going to be the strongest, because in the end, the…

You know, the competition, your competition as a chamber for that $250 membership or the $10,000 sponsorship is not the chamber in the next town. It’s every other group out there that says, if you give me a dollar, I can help you grow your business. So it’s the networking tip clubs. It’s the manufacturers group. It’s a, you got AI groups popping up all over the place. it’s social media. It’s any of those organizations that can.

Brandon Burton (42:55.128)
social media.

Craig Turner (43:00.353)
that can do that and in the end you think about what would one of the bread and butter for chambers was always education. But you know what I don’t need to take 90 minutes out of my day because I can go to Chetch EBT and get all the information I need right there. So it’s that intimate relationship with your members again even the small business members who come and go that you know okay so I know what you need and we have a team of people here to help you do it.

I always call it the bad phone. That’s what I tell every member at our chamber in Niagara USA is you have a sun speed dial because there’s going to be something that crosses your desk this month that you’ve never seen before. And we have five, almost 500 other members who have seen it already. So don’t waste your time trying to figure it out yourself. Just call us. We’ll connect you with somebody who’s, who’s already seen it. But I think that’s going to be, I think that’s going to be important is, is that knowledge and this data driven economy, knowledge of your members.

what they need, what makes them tick, so that you are always in a position to take care of them. Because that’s something a chamber can offer that a lot of those other groups can’t.

Brandon Burton (44:04.43)
That’s right. Good advice. Well, Craig, where do you want to point any listeners to that might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about Momentum and the services you offer? Where would you point them?

Craig Turner (44:16.471)
So I’ll give you two. So MomentumHub.ai is our website and that’s got everything. And it’s separated into chambers and businesses, but actually there’s some tools on there that people might really like. There’s an FAQ on how can I use AI for membership? How can I use AI for renewals? So there’s a drop down there with an FAQ. The other thing I just recently put on there are member-ready blogs on AI.

So they’re right there. You can take them, can give them to your members, you can post them. You know, we just have a little disclaimer at the end, just say it was ours, but you can post it as your own content. We’re excited about that because again, like I said earlier, I believe so much that Chambers need to be front and center on this. We’re going to give you everything you need to do that. The other thing is LinkedIn. I’m super active on LinkedIn, as you mentioned a few times today. And my LinkedIn is usually 50 % Chambers, 50 % AI and then whatever else I feel like talking about, it’s usually chamber and AI related. I appreciate that. I will say, I just one quick story real quick. So Chad GPT told me that, cause I’m big on LinkedIn and I’m talking to you, how do we grow as a tech company? And at Chat GPT said you have to be on X. So I started an X account and I went over there and I’m

Brandon Burton (45:19.278)
He’s got cool stuff on LinkedIn though, so check him out, follow him. Yeah. Yep.

Craig Turner (45:42.355)
I mean engaging and getting in with people and man that those are the techies those are the that’ll be intimidating so let’s just say that I’m taking the intimidating techie stuff from X and that’s the kind of stuff that goes on my LinkedIn in a more palatable version for people.

Brandon Burton (45:59.086)
Thanks for making it simpler for us. I appreciate it. Yeah. Right.

Craig Turner (46:02.689)
Yeah, yeah, wow. My head was spinning when I went over there.

Brandon Burton (46:07.81)
Well, Craig, this has been fun having you back on the podcast. We may need to make this a more regular thing to have you on and share what’s the latest thing in AI and just help keep chambers up to speed so they can keep their member businesses up to speed and help the business community overall throughout this country. So thank you for sharing your insights and knowledge with us today.

Craig Turner (46:11.373)
That’s good.

Craig Turner (46:25.792)
Absolutely.

Craig Turner (46:29.601)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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Chambers as a Lighthouse with Matt Appenzeller

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Brandon Burton (00:00.902)
Today’s guest is a dynamic, I’m gonna start that over. I forgot my intro. 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. Today’s guest is a dynamic leader in the world of small business advocacy and economic development.

Matt Appenzeller is the executive director of the Southern Ohio Chamber Alliance, representing 127 chambers of commerce and helping thousands of small businesses access health insurance and other vital benefits. He also serves as plan administrator for the SOCA benefit plan, a statewide medical plan designed specifically for small employers.

Matt’s leadership journey includes serving as executive director of the Preble County Chamber of Commerce, where he spearheaded the creation of the Preble County Economic Development Partnership and was named community leader of the year in 2012. Passionate about cultivating the next generation of entrepreneurs, he also serves as president of the Board of Trustees for the Ohio Business Week Foundation, a hands-on business camp for high school students hosted at the Ohio University’s College of Business.

two decades of experience in sales and management and a proud seven-year tenure in the US Army, brings a wealth of knowledge, discipline, and commitment to service. He currently resides in Cincinnati with his wife Lauren. Matt, welcome to Chamber Chat podcast. We’re happy to have you on the show today. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions out there listening. If you would share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Matt Appenzeller (01:52.044)
Well, to share something interesting, I was stationed in Germany before and after the Berlin Wall fell. So I got to see it before and after.

Brandon Burton (02:06.437)
that how long were you there on either end of that mark in history?

Matt Appenzeller (02:10.397)
So I was there for a total of four and a half years and I had been there, gosh, I want to say like two and a half years, two and three quarter years when it fell and then finished out my actually second enlistment from there.

Brandon Burton (02:33.623)
I just, yes, yeah, yeah.

Brandon Burton (03:05.657)
Well, is a that is an interesting fact about you. In fact, just last week I met a German native who grew up and lived his whole life in Germany and talked about, you know, what a significance that was when the wall came down and just a life changer for for the whole the whole area. So very cool.

Matt Appenzeller (03:24.086)
Yeah, yeah, for the, yeah, I think that, you know, the concept of freedom, we all talk about that in our own country here, but, you know, think about a time when, you know, people in East Germany literally risked their lives just to get across the border. And if, you know, there were

It was a militarized zone and they were avoiding gunfire to do it. So that’s how precious freedom is.

Brandon Burton (03:54.989)
Yeah. Yeah, freedom’s a great thing. Awesome. Well, tell us a little bit about Soka. Help give us an idea of the organization, the size. I know your bio talked about 127 chambers that you guys serve, but just help kind of set the stage for what you guys do and who you serve and that scope of work you’re involved with.

Matt Appenzeller (04:17.166)
Sure. So the Southern Ohio Chamber Alliance exists to support Chambers of Commerce. So what we do is we cultivate relationships with insurance carriers, brokers, and other affinity partners so that we can offer cost saving and value added products and services to employers. But we do that through Chambers of Commerce, which helps the chambers drive membership.

and also drive non dues revenue for the chamber. Southern Ohio Chamber Alliance has been around now for, we’re in our, we’re in our 33rd year. I’ve been leading the organization for the past 13 years. know, typically our meat and potatoes is so to speak, has been through healthcare or health insurance. We’ve had a series of partnerships over the years. Currently.

You know, after the, the affordable care act was formed, us and some other interested partners got together to start a self-insured plan for small employers that gave the small employer like the same chance of the self-insured plan that a large employer would have. And Brandon, I got to tell you, it’s whenever I’m speaking about this in front of people.

You know, we thought that this would be a temporary thing until Congress sort of shored up some provisions within the Affordable Care Act as it relates to small employers. And about a year and a half into it, we discovered that, know what, Congress is not going to do anything anytime soon. So we went ahead and put our foot on the accelerator, so to speak, and it’s done very, very well.

It’s actually called a multiple employer welfare arrangement. That’s the legal term of the plan. And we’ve been able to serve over 7,000 employers in that health plan. And it’s a, it’s a privilege to be able to offer that kind of value. And we’ve gotten now, including our approximately, you know, 130 chambers, we, we have chambers throughout the state who also participate in that with us. And so,

Matt Appenzeller (06:40.024)
We’ve got about 275 chambers of commerce in Ohio that are helping with the distribution of that plan.

Brandon Burton (06:46.981)
When I think of over 7,000 employers and then break that down to the number of employees and families that that affects, that’s huge. That is a huge impact.

Matt Appenzeller (06:55.882)
It is. It is. We’ve been hovering around, you know, 50,000 employee lives for a really long time. And like you just said, I mean, it’s a big number and it’s a privilege to be able to do it.

Brandon Burton (07:16.771)
Well, for our topic of discussion today, just a little bit of background for listeners, Matt and I have gone back and forth on some emails and LinkedIn chats and different things. And I think even at ACCE last year, we talked a little bit, it was, Matt’s had some pretty neat ideas that we’ve gone back and forth about. He’s working on a new book right now where some of these ideas are going to be flushed out even more. But I’d said, you know, it would be good just to get you on the podcast.

and we’ll talk about some of these ideas that you’re trying to get out there and more normalized in the chamber world and shine a light on it. So we’re gonna kind of be all over the place, you know, throughout this conversation, but it’s all gonna be chamber focused and it’s gonna be all about improving the impact that a chamber can have. And we’ll dive into this as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Matt, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re gonna dive in on all things Chamber. So I mentioned you’re working on a new book. I don’t know if you wanna start with kind of what the book’s focus is gonna be on or if you wanna dive into some of the specifics. Do you have any preference?

Matt Appenzeller (08:19.273)
Awesome. Let’s do it.

Matt Appenzeller (08:33.247)
Yeah, well, let me start by, you know, kind of just laying out how it got started, right? So I used to spend a significant amount of time on the road visiting chambers. Now we’ve hired someone to do that, but…

Over the 13 years of not just me doing that, but the other two people on our staff, between the three of us, we’ve got about 50 years of chamber experience, right? And we see the same four problems that local chambers, you know, they end up having, they experience them over and over and over. And so I wrote this paper called the four critical challenges facing local chambers of commerce today.

And, you know, somebody said, I can’t remember. think it was somebody on my staff said, you know, you don’t just write a book. I actually think I said that and she said, yeah, you kind of should. And so we just sort of expanded the ideas from there. And, and here we are, right. I, it’s this, writing a book as I’m finding out as a, as a huge undertaking. sometimes it’s very enjoyable and sometimes it’s not.

but we’re just trying to get the word out. one of the things I see Brandon is we see changes in leadership at these chambers of commerce. And I know that with your background, you have seen it also. they just ended up recreating the wheel, right? Before the next change in leadership. And so if we can put some…

literature out there that maybe helps to reduce that and helps to point chambers at least in the maybe in the right direction or at least points out what problems that they’re going to face and how to avoid them well then I feel that we’ve we’ve put out a valuable product.

Brandon Burton (10:42.061)
And you’re right, I’ve seen it a number of times and people will join the chamber because they like the chamber president, the executive, know, there’s something, some connection there or the salesperson that sold them was really good and they really liked that salesperson but then that salesperson gets hired on at another business in the community and that member fades away, you know, once renewal comes around because that salesperson’s not there. So being able to get to that core value of what the chamber does,

Matt Appenzeller (11:04.568)
That’s right. That’s right.

Brandon Burton (11:12.005)
the chamber is going to be in the future, I think is so critical to be able to retain that purpose for chambers and how they operate and being able to help ingrain that in their membership.

Matt Appenzeller (11:27.046)
Absolutely. And, you know, we recently had a conversation with one of our guests on our podcast that, you know, he says it’s all about relationships. Well, and he’s right. He’s right. It is. And when you have these changes in leadership, you know, those relationships get interrupted and then they have to be reconstituted. And it just, is very difficult for a chamber to have.

some moment gain momentum if they’re constantly having those leadership changes. So that in itself, now that I’m on it, that is one of the four critical challenges, you know, facing chambers of commerce is leadership and specifically the changes in leadership.

Brandon Burton (11:58.928)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (12:14.233)
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the aspects that you talk about, that we’ve talked about, and I know you’re addressing in the book as well, is you have this really intriguing analogy that you’ve used between lighthouses and lampposts. Do you want to tell us what that, what your background, what the analogy is all about and how chambers can take that home?

Matt Appenzeller (12:36.717)
Sure.

Matt Appenzeller (12:43.454)
Absolutely, absolutely. So let me start at the beginning of that, right? So one of the things that think chambers really need to do is to have the right mindset on who they are as a chamber. If you’re just going to be this community organization or if you’re going to be a beacon of light, right?

And one of the things, as you know, has occurred in our profession is there’s this emphasis on the word relevance, that chambers need to be relevant. And I’m going to take exception to that, right? In fact, I do take exception to that. I think that, well, let me tell a story. I’ll do it that way. So I’m…

doing some work on my laptop and my wife is next to me on the couch and she’s watching one of the entertainment shows. I think it’s the extra with Mario Lopez and whatnot. But anyway, this aging celebrity gets on the show and is pitching their pet product. And my wife says, well, look at so-and-so just trying to be relevant again. And I thought to myself, boy.

Brandon Burton (13:52.941)
Ouch.

Matt Appenzeller (13:56.018)
Yeah. mean, is this where we really are? I mean, is this where we really are with change? Are we really like aging institutions just trying to remain relevant again? If that’s the case, we need to stop talking about setting our sights on being relevant and we need to start raising our sights to having an impact. So I say all of that.

Brandon Burton (14:17.965)
Relevance almost a relevance a point of desperation almost so

Matt Appenzeller (14:21.87)
It seems that way. we want to take chambers from relevant to impact. And so we drew the analogy of, hey, do you want to be a lamp post? Well, that’s being relevant. You’re just shining a light on a little square or a little portion of the public square. Or do you want to be a lighthouse where members and the community are looking to you for direction?

And you are being the spotlight. You’re not trying to be in the spotlight. You are being the spotlight for your community. So which one do you want to be chamber? And that’s why I say chambers of commerce. One of the very first things they need to do is just think about the mindset that they currently have. If it’s centered around relevance, I’m here to tell you that’s way too low.

Brandon Burton (15:12.665)
Yeah, yeah, I would totally agree with that. And as you were talking about the lighthouse shining the light.

I see some correlation even with Dave Atkinson’s book, Horseshoe vs. Chess, where he correlates the, running a chamber is like playing chess, where each piece is a different part of your community. You’ve got tourism, economic development, school district, city, all these different entities. And as a convener,

Matt Appenzeller (15:28.344)
See, mm-hmm.

Matt Appenzeller (15:37.806)
That’s right.

Brandon Burton (15:45.534)
a chamber should be shining the light on the different chess pieces. So that lamp post, not lamp post, that lighthouse rather, as that light’s going around, it should be shining on those different chess pieces each time it goes around. So I love the analogy. It really resonates for me. And hopefully those that are hearing this, hopefully it’s turning on a light in their minds as well as to what they can do.

Matt Appenzeller (16:09.358)
Well, thank you. And I try to outline that in the book as best as I can. I guess readers will have to tell me if it resonated with them. But the analogy is clear. mean, just don’t think that we can settle for just, you know.

shining a light on this small area. We need to be the spotlight and be that leader where people literally look to us for direction. The world is changing very rapidly now. we need to be able to use, chambers of commerce need to be able to use their convening authority, as you mentioned, to do just that and to be that beacon of light for their community.

Brandon Burton (16:58.723)
Yeah. And I think if you are operating as a lamp post, I mean, I don’t want anybody to feel bad, but you you’re, missing the mark. I mean, it really, if you’re, if that’s all that you’re focused on, there’s a lot of other parts of the community that need attention and it will really take your chamber to a place of impact. So I love that. This kind of transitions us to the next thought that I wanted to address with you is,

Matt Appenzeller (17:16.866)
That’s right. That’s right.

Brandon Burton (17:28.407)
So some chambers are operating as a lamppost, and some have caught the vision and they’re operating more as a lighthouse now.

I know it’s been an issue for you. I’ve recognized it as well, but how can a chamber?

see how they’re measuring up. How do they compare to other chambers amongst their peers? I know ACC has their annual benchmark survey, but what percentage of chambers participate in that? So that’s a problem in and of itself, but I know you have some thoughts about trying to measure and see the performance of your organization compared to others.

Matt Appenzeller (18:01.602)
that’s right

Matt Appenzeller (18:11.468)
Yeah, yeah, that’s right, Brandon. another one of the four critical challenges that we’ve said is that in our profession, there is a shockingly low amount of industry standard metrics within our industry. Now, ACCE does a great job of collecting data and publishing it every year.

I guess one of my concerns is that no one really knows about it. Well, there’s actually two things, right? Number one, I’m not sure that they’re getting enough participation in that. And then number two, once it is published, like no one really knows about it unless you’re a member. And so…

Matt Appenzeller (19:01.678)
It renders the data almost irrelevant because if no one’s seeing it, right, if not enough people are seeing it. So an argument that I make in the book is that, one of the things as you know, and Dave Atkinson outlined this in his book. And so we need to get away from the saying that says, if you’ve seen one chamber of commerce, you’ve seen one. Right. Because.

That I believe is harmful to the profession. What chambers need now is to be able to have metrics and not myths, right? Every chamber can be measured on a certain amount of standard metrics. We recently developed a scorecard for chambers that we actually are just rolling out this week. And we…

are measuring chambers in on seven data points across three broad categories. Those broad categories are membership growth, financial strength, and revenue composition. until chambers, especially the smaller chambers and brand again, you have experience working with some of these smaller chambers and smaller communities, right? I think one of the biggest problems is, is they don’t know how they’re

being against their peers. And so they, they, kind of choose this strategy is maybe this working and maybe this strategy and, they don’t have any benchmark. That’s right. That’s right. And so with, if you have standard metrics, industry standard metrics, you can isolate where those strengths and weaknesses are within your own organization. And you can build up the strengths and you can also, you know, begin working on those weaknesses as well.

Brandon Burton (20:41.005)
It’s a lot of guessing. Yeah.

Matt Appenzeller (21:02.176)
So that’s what we’re trying to do here. We’ve got a kind of got a small audience to work with. Hopefully we’ll gain some traction with it, but I’m confident that if we just persist, we will.

Brandon Burton (21:15.375)
Yeah, as you mentioned with the ACCE benchmarking surveys and the results and the whole reason that I started this podcast is trying to help those chambers that are underserved that their board doesn’t allow for them to have the budget to participate in their state association or ACCE. So as those results come out and they’re a struggling chamber that needs to know what these standards should be, what they should measure themselves against, and they don’t get access to these

reports because their board doesn’t allow them the budget to do so it just perpetuates the problem and we need to be able to help get it out and I think you know with these areas that you’re talking about measurement for those should be standards across different chambers and it still allows for the autonomy for chambers to address the needs specific to their community while still having those the standards to work with.

Matt Appenzeller (21:48.024)
That’s right.

Matt Appenzeller (21:52.772)
That’s right.

Matt Appenzeller (22:12.046)
That’s right. Let me give you an example. Let me give you an example and I don’t want to give too far off track, but like, okay, let’s just take, you know, let’s just take Richardson, Texas, which I know is kind of near you in the North Dallas area. And I don’t know if Richardson has a chamber or not. I’m just saying that, right? Okay. Okay. So I mean, if you declare yourself a chamber of commerce in Richardson, Texas, then what that chamber probably has done,

Brandon Burton (22:29.241)
They do, yeah.

Matt Appenzeller (22:40.346)
is they’ve put a boundary around their service area. And so you’ve automatically restricted your market area. So I don’t think chambers understand the significance of doing that. Like any business out here, you wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t draw a boundary around where you would sell your product or service. You would try to expand it as far as you can.

I know that we do that for a reason, but you got to understand how that impacts the bottom line by doing that. within that, let’s say that we determine for a chamber of that size that the standard market penetration rate is, let’s just say it’s 28%. And Brandon, you’re running a chamber and I’m running a chamber, right?

So Brandon, in your chamber, let’s say we both have the same goal of increasing revenue by 15%. Your chamber is running at 20 % market penetration. So we know that you’re already eight points below what the average is. Well, operationally, your choices are very clear. You just need to increase your sales effort, which will increase membership dollars.

and probably sponsorship dollars because an increased number of members. Now, on the other hand, if my chamber is that 36 % market penetration rate, and I’m already eight points over what the average is, it would be a really bad business decision for me to do exactly the same thing you are. And that’s why we need to have metrics, these standard metrics, because depending on where you’re at,

Brandon Burton (24:25.881)
Yeah.

Matt Appenzeller (24:33.332)
in the spectrum of things, you’re going to make different business decisions about where you’re

Brandon Burton (24:40.877)
I love that perspective of being able to see where to allocate resources. I think you’ll still, I would imagine you’ll have your outliers who are way ahead of the pack that are gonna bring that industry standard up higher than, you know, mess up the curve for everybody. But it does help to see where to align your efforts and focus to be able to meet those goals.

Matt Appenzeller (24:57.838)
That’s right. That’s right.

Matt Appenzeller (25:09.57)
Yeah, and hopefully we’ll be able to create cohorts to where those outliers are with the other outliers. And at least they can be compared to each other, right?

Brandon Burton (25:16.407)
Yeah, that makes, yeah, yeah, I like that. And as far as the geography goes, you see a lot of chambers that are starting to address that in their name at least, being the using Richardson, maybe the greater Richardson or the Richardson area chamber. So it’s not just that geographic area, but branches out a little bit, but.

Matt Appenzeller (25:41.422)
That’s right. That’s right.

Brandon Burton (25:42.992)
To your point though, in today’s world, as a business owner, you’re not gonna limit yourself, especially with websites and just the online presence. Anyone in the world could be a potential customer. So as a chamber, why would you limit? And chambers have websites and a lot of them you can join members, join the chamber, can even do sponsorships through their website oftentimes. So why would you limit it? So, yeah.

Matt Appenzeller (26:08.664)
That’s right. That’s right. There’s something to think about it because it does impact the bottom line and the long-term viability of your chamber.

Brandon Burton (26:17.315)
Yeah, absolutely. Do you want to touch on the other two areas and just highlight those a little bit?

Matt Appenzeller (26:25.038)
Sure.

Yeah, so let me back up with the four critical challenges. We say that two of those challenges impact all chambers, and those are the pace of technology and industry standard metrics. The other two challenges only impact some chambers because other chambers have actually solved that problem. And those challenges are leadership and complacency.

Now, if we start with technology, we are living in a really strange time as it comes to technology. mean, it is coming at us in waves. And everybody, think, is having difficulty keeping up with that challenge. But as it relates to chambers, if

If you’re not keeping pace, if you’re not modernizing, if you’re not standardizing, optimizing, or using, if you’re using outdated technology infrastructure, you know, it’s hard for your members to have confidence in you because they’re using that stuff while you are, right? So I know it sounds like keeping up with the Joneses, but that’s just the reality of where we’re at right now as it, as it.

comes to technology.

Brandon Burton (27:51.312)
So on the technology front, I’ve.

You know, obviously with AI, there’s people of different camps and different, you know, different thoughts around it. But, um, to your point, if you’re not using the latest tool sets, if you’re not using the latest technologies that your members are using, that, puts you at a disadvantage. It puts you at a place of, you know, maybe not knowing what you should know to be able to help the business community. Um, but all of your chambers, you know, have the pushback of, well,

Chambers are all about the relationships and if we rely too much on AI Then we’re not building those relationships and having that human touch with our members How would you rebut that? What would your thought be with that?

Matt Appenzeller (28:41.42)
Well, I would say that first of all, the next phase, as far as I understand, the next phase of AI is that it’s going to be into the agentic phase. And so you don’t just have to be using AI for communications. You can be using it for other parts of your operation to do tasks for you that help you save time. But I would also say that an interesting proposition here is I know of at least one chamber that is considering

using AI to make retention phone calls, right? Because that agent can work for them in retention 24-7, right? And so I think that chambers of commerce will need to explore every possibility on how this can be used and what works best for them.

Brandon Burton (29:35.813)
Yeah.

And obviously, you know, the caveat is it comes with training. comes with, you know, being able to give a scope for the AI agent to do, you know, what you want it to do and to not just be another, you know, spam call that you get the filter through. But so there’s all that to deal with. But I think you make a great point that the businesses in your community are using these things to save costs, to be able to stay competitive. And we need to as well as chambers, as an industry, we need to do it to show

Matt Appenzeller (29:46.147)
That’s right.

Matt Appenzeller (29:50.593)
Right.

Brandon Burton (30:07.016)
Not just that we’re relevant, but that we see where the word things are going where the puck is headed, right?

Matt Appenzeller (30:11.214)
That’s right. can’t be a lighthouse for AI at least in what all your other members are using when you yourself are not using it.

Brandon Burton (30:23.331)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, is there anything else that you wanted to touch on? I know we’ve covered a lot and there’s a lot still to go, but what else stands out for you?

Matt Appenzeller (30:31.971)
You know?

Well, there’s just a lot of ground here. And so I would say just in one of the other areas, as far as complacency goes, I think that in some of these smaller chambers over time, what ends up happening is, I don’t think it’s like a conscious choice. I just think that they have mission drift that over time, you know, they have somehow become, you know, rather than the chamber of commerce, they become like the

the chamber of charity or the chamber of community or the chamber of civics, as one of my colleagues used to say. And then there’s also this sort of hesitance, hesitancy to have an impact on their community because having an impact as a leader in your community means that yes, you do need to stick your neck out there and.

Sometimes people are not going to take too kindly of that. Yeah. So you just got to understand that, you know, impact makes waves. That’s a kind of the point we make in the book that, you know, you can’t shy away from it. I mean, it’s just part of the territory. This is Sue. This is the role that you’re in as a leader and as a chamber. And if you want to make an impact in your community, you are going to make some waves.

Brandon Burton (31:33.325)
It burned a little bit,

Matt Appenzeller (31:57.912)
So I’m just making you aware of that, right? You can’t shy away from it.

Brandon Burton (31:59.312)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you can’t lead a chamber just to make friends, you know, it’s gonna, it’s gonna make some ways for sure. It’s a great note. Well, Matt, I like asking everyone I have on the show, especially on behalf of those listening who have that desire to take their chamber up to the next level. And I would say even to be a chamber of impact, what kind of tip or action item would you leave with them to try to accomplish that goal?

Matt Appenzeller (32:06.21)
That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. That’s right.

Matt Appenzeller (32:30.35)
well, I’d say just actually two things. First of all, again, back to technology, make sure that you are modernizing, standardizing, optimizing. That’s really important in today’s day and age. I know it’s coming at us fast. I know that you may make a decision now about a product and all of sudden the technology changes, you know, three weeks later, but you just kind of have to roll with it. The second thing that I would just say is that, you know, if people would

If they have ever read ACCE’s original Horizon Report in 2025, you know, they talk about catalytic leadership and that’s the kind of leadership that your chamber needs where you are the people who are initiating change, not just the one that is helping them cope with change, right?

And so I think that that’s the kind of chamber, the most successful chambers are going to be the ones who are doing that.

Brandon Burton (33:37.541)
Love that, not just to help them cope with change. The chamber of counseling, right? Yeah.

Matt Appenzeller (33:41.334)
Those aren’t my words. Yeah, mean, yeah, I mean, those aren’t my words, but those that comes directly out of the report. I highly encourage people to read that and also read the follow-up report for 2035.

Brandon Burton (33:51.385)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (33:57.562)
Yeah, awesome. Well, Matt, the other question I like asking everybody, and I think this is going to be particularly on point with our discussion today, how do you see the future of chambers going, the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Matt Appenzeller (34:16.536)
Yeah.

I think a lot of that is gonna be dependent on where technology takes us, right? I see.

smaller chambers coming to the realization that they’re going to need to merge simply because like the industrial era is kind of over, right? I mean, I’m not gonna say it’s completely over, but you just don’t get a lot of new building as much as you have new technology that is driving commerce, right? And so,

And so I think in some of these smaller communities where they may have been bedroom communities and a segment of their population, you know, drove to the next county and that’s where everybody worked. And now those jobs are no longer there. I just think it’s the prudent move for them would be to consider merging with other.

smaller chambers within their area and just forming regional chambers and doing it that

Brandon Burton (35:30.019)
Yeah, yeah, definitely could be some value in doing that and obviously, know, assessing the needs in your community and see where that technology takes us. It’ll be a fun ride for sure. Well, man, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information or anywhere you’d like to point anyone to that might want to learn more about these concepts you’re talking about or connect with you and where would you point them and direct them?

Matt Appenzeller (35:37.602)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Appenzeller (35:41.55)
That’s right. That’s right.

Matt Appenzeller (35:58.702)
Sure, well, you can go to our website at joinsoca.com, joinsaka.com, or you can send us an email at info@joinsoca.com. If you want to learn more about the scorecard or maybe some of these other concepts, we’d happy to share them with you.

Brandon Burton (36:19.055)
Very good. We’ll make sure those are in our show notes as well. So it’ll be nice and easy to find and click on. But Matt, this has been great having you on the show. I look forward to the book coming out and getting it out there is another core piece to the chamber library that all these chamber leaders out there should have.

Matt Appenzeller (36:39.827)
Yeah, so just one more point on that, know, Dave Atkinson challenged all of us really like to have this dialogue and that’s really all I’m trying to do. I mean, I personally think that we need more literature out there because we just don’t have a lot. So that’s all I’m trying to do is just make a contribution to our profession before my time is up. Right. So thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Brandon Burton (37:06.943)
Absolutely, it’s been my pleasure.

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Creating a Chamber Flywheel with Dave Moravec

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Brandon Burton (00:01.57)
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. Today’s guest is a dynamic leader and author.

Since 2020, Dave Moravec has served as a president of the Colerain Chamber of Commerce, bringing with him over four decades of experience in business ownership and leadership across diverse industries.

From owning a printing company to leading chambers in both Illinois and Ohio, and even working in educational technology, Dave’s career is a testament to versatility and vision. Under his leadership, the Colerain Chamber earned the prestigious title of Ohio’s Chamber of the Year for Small Chambers in 2021, reflecting his commitment to foster business growth, connection, and collaboration.

Dave is all about meaningful work and creating strategic opportunities for local businesses to thrive. Outside of his professional achievements, Dave is a published author and avid traveler and still hits the field for competitive baseball. His latest ventures include releasing Echoes Across the Tracks in 2024 and two more books in 2025.

Dave, 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 bit better.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (01:41.15)
appreciate that, Brandon. Again, after a long career in for-profit work, I landed myself in the Chamber of Commerce field, not really thinking that this was gonna be a late in life career shift, but it’s turned out really well, and I’m sure we’ll talk about that. Something somebody would not know about me would be that I was on the Jay Leno Tonight Show in 2011.

I have a bar trick where I can balance coins on my elbow and catch them in a snatch form. And they had a segment where they gave out a meal or no meal if you did your trick on stage, so on screen. So they flew me out to California, got to meet Jay, got lots of notoriety at that time, literally 15 seconds of fame.

Brandon Burton (02:23.212)
Okay.

Brandon Burton (02:37.542)
That’s awesome. So how many coins could you stack on your elbow to snatch in that action?

Dave Moravec – Colerain (02:44.362)
Well, not only did I stack them on my elbow, but I also was blindfolded while doing it. So I’ve logged to my LinkedIn page. If anybody is interested, there’s a blog post from back then blindfolded by Jay Leno. Ultimately, I caught 25 coins, 25 half dollars because the studio was so cold. My hand was freezing up. They have the hot lights on the stage.

Brandon Burton (02:51.093)
Okay.

Brandon Burton (03:13.517)
Yeah.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (03:13.822)
So they keep the foodie-o really cold. Well, your hand freezes up and so the producer said, we don’t care how many you catch, it’s just the fact that you’re getting blindfolded by Jay and you’re gonna catch some coins. It’s a silly thing. we just had some fun with it and I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.

Brandon Burton (03:35.215)
That’s awesome. I’m sure there’s a whole story on how you got onto the radar to get on the Tonight Show, but that’s a great fact and I love finding out these little tidbits about people. That’s awesome. Well, tell us a little bit more about the Colerain Chamber. Give us an idea of the size, staff, scope of work you guys are involved with, budget, to kind of set the stage for our discussion today.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (03:55.614)
Sure.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (03:59.624)
Yeah, our chamber’s only 11 years old and I came in five and a half years ago to take over as the first executive director, president, CEO. And we had a previous president that was part-time, had laid the foundation for the logo, the website, chamber master, all sorts of foundational pieces. And my role was to take it to the next level.

I started February 10th of 2020 just as COVID was about to happen. And we kind of threw out the 2020 plan and went a different direction. At the time we pared down our membership because people hadn’t come off of the roles that should have come off the roles. We determined there were about 150 active members at that time. We currently have about 275.

So we’ve not quite doubled in the five plus years that I’ve been here. We manage about a $250,000 budget and our community is 60,000 residents. So the second largest township in all of Ohio. myself, part-time marketing and events coordinator. She does some of the admin work. And then I have a part-time person who manages our green initiative.

We’ve got the largest waste facility in greater Cincinnati in our community and litter and recycling and composting is really important to us. So we’ve made an investment from a staff perspective to have a part-time person that does that. myself and two part-time people.

Brandon Burton (05:40.537)
Wow. Well, that definitely helps to get us that perspective. And it seems like there’s been a lot of chamber professionals who were hired in that first quarter of 2020, right before, you know, everything kind of fell apart. So you’re in good company with a lot of others who got thrown into the fire and had to learn, you know, with a lot of stress going on. we’ve…

Dave Moravec – Colerain (06:04.392)
Well, it worked. It worked actually in my favor because of my background in corporate work. You always have to be ready for a challenge. You have to be ready for a paradigm shift. And so when COVID was announced as, you know, closing down the state and it was March 17th, it actually was the day we moved physically to Ohio from Illinois as well. So I’m in a new community, a new situation.

And we just sat down and brainstormed what we could do, what would be allowable under the situation. And we just made it work. And it was just a natural fit. And I’ve told people for the last five years, it was the best decision I made.

Brandon Burton (06:48.064)
Yeah, you know, my family actually moved that same week too. And it gave us a lot of time to hang pictures and unpack boxes and all that with the, you know, being quarantined, but work goes on.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (06:57.33)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (07:02.444)
But so you have another interesting fact about you that was shared in the the bio, but you’re an author. So Echoes Across the Tracks. Before we get into our topic for today, I wanted to have you tell us a little bit about Echoes Across the Tracks and how it came to be, where the idea came from and what you tap into as you as you write the series. I mean, there’s there’s three books now.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (07:20.67)
Yeah.

Brandon Burton (07:30.53)
But give us that high level synopsis of it and the idea for it.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (07:31.07)
rooms.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (07:34.825)
Yeah. Yeah. And Thanksgiving of 2023. So not quite two years ago. I just had an idea to sit down and tell a story. And the more I wrote, the more it turned into a book. I’ve done a lot of travel as most of us have. We’ve had crazy travel and I had a really crazy travel experience, planes, trains and automobiles type experience over the summer coming back from Colorado.

And so I started writing one, it was the Friday after Thanksgiving. And I just kept typing and typing and by the end of the weekend, I had 10 chapters done. And by the end of the week, the following week, I was done with the book with 17 chapters. Echoes Across the Tracks takes place on the Amtrak train from New Orleans to Chicago.

Main characters heading to the airport as much of us do, we get a flight cancellation notice and we have to react to it. I guess kind of like the chamber reaction in March of 2020. Something had to happen and my cab driver in the story suggests that the main character Charlie take the train instead. And that starts a 30 hour journey from New Orleans to Chicago on the Amtrak train.

The subtitle is Life Lessons Through Unexpected Connections, because you never know where you’re gonna meet somebody. And the train was a good vehicle to be able to talk about networking and meeting people in a professional way and looking others in the eye and shaking hands. The story is told from my perspective. Charlie is an aging business consultant who’s promoting a book in New Orleans. And the story…

takes place over that 30 hour period and it really is just that short a period that the story is told.

Brandon Burton (09:33.241)
So there’s even some chamber connection through the book. As I’ve started reading it, the main character, Charlie, had a profession as a chamber leader. So I love that connection and the tie-in and trying to make, I know if it was your intent, but I like the efforts in trying to make chambers of commerce more mainstream and more front of mind, if we can, to the average person in the community.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (10:01.256)
Yeah, absolutely. We become ambassadors and I’m sure we’ll talk about it as we go through the conversation here, Brandon, but I feel like we can all be ambassadors for Chamber of Commerce, just like we are for a restaurant or for a hotel or for a particular business. And so the last two pages of the book, I actually devote to describing what I call the Chamber of Commerce.

value proposition. And I spell it out really simple in four paragraphs. And somebody who picks up the book, who’s a business professional, may have not thought about Chamber of Commerce as a way to network or to provide marketing support for their business, to get involved in their community or look for ways to compete with larger businesses, you know, in their market space. And so there’s a purpose for, you know, for putting that

piece in at the end. I did so in the sequel that I just recently produced as well. I kept the exact same value proposition in the back of the book to keep it consistent. But Charlie, the main character, has to head back to New Orleans for reasons that I won’t share here because we don’t have enough time. yeah, I don’t want to do that. But the second story is

Brandon Burton (11:20.824)
Can’t spoil the story either, so.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (11:28.242)
think just as interesting and compelling, but doesn’t focus on networking, focuses on customer service. And customer service today in many industries has been taken down a notch because of a variety of different things that business owners aren’t really thinking about. And so I felt that it was important to do so and wrote that into the second book.

Brandon Burton (11:52.183)
Yeah, that’s great. I’ve been enjoying it and I would encourage anybody else listening to check it out. Great story and you’ve got a great creative mind to put it together.

So maybe as a little bit of a segue in the book that goes across the tracks, the main character Charlie, he’s learning and sharing business practices that he’s learned throughout his career and in a large way, that’s what the podcast is for, having different chamber leaders on and talking about business lessons and things that they’ve learned through their career. So today we have Dave on the show to talk about creating a

Dave Moravec – Colerain (12:05.544)
Thank you, Brenda.

Brandon Burton (12:35.472)
chamber flywheel. And it’s a term that I’ve heard before, but I haven’t heard in the term of chambers using a flywheel or creating a flywheel at their chamber. So we’ll dive into that and what all that means as soon as I get back from this quick break.

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All right, Dave, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about creating a chamber flywheel today.

What does that term mean to you? Where did this come from and how have you guys worked to implement this at the Colerain Chamber?

Dave Moravec – Colerain (13:09.032)
Sure, we actually have two flywheels. The concept is easy to find if you go to Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great. It’s got a red cover and it has a ring to it. Just like my wife, her name is Patty. So we go by Dave and Patty from Cincinnati. Well, you can find the flywheel in Good to Great in chapter eight. And if you find Jim Collins’ purpose behind it,

He talks about the four to six things that make a business go faster or grow faster or to become stronger But you have to sit down and think about those things and once you come up with those four to six unique Ideas processes Whatever that looks like for your organization and in our case the Chamber of Commerce Then you have to put them in order

and do them in the proper order. So as an example, we might invite people to the chamber and do that really well. And we might do marketing really well. But if we do them in backwards order, we may not get the same result. And so we as a Chamber of Commerce in 2020, I took the Board of Directors through this flywheel process because I didn’t know the community. I was new here.

certainly knew the process of creating a flywheel and using it, but I wasn’t sure what that meant for our Chamber of Commerce. So we did that, we created that flywheel, and then I incorporated a second flywheel. And that’s really what I’ve been teaching on for the last five years, Brandon, to other Chamber leaders. It really has three components. One at the top, where you’re attracting businesses to your Chamber of Commerce.

And if you’re attractive to those chambers of, to the businesses in your community, meaning if you’ve got an outward way about you, your marketing, et cetera, is strong, you’re gonna be attractive and attract others. Well, once you do, you bring them to an event or you show them the value proposition of being involved in a chamber of commerce, you have to engage them. So the second component is engagement.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (15:29.738)
That means coming out to an event, talking to other people, doing something besides sitting in your office and going, well, yeah, maybe I’ll send a check to the Chamber of Commerce. They got to get up and do something. So you have to find a way to engage them. And once you do, hopefully the enthusiasm of your Chamber of Commerce is going to be so compelling that they’re going to become a member or in our case, we use the word investor. So we’re investing in our community. We’re investing in our Chamber of Commerce. We’re investing

in our business community. And once they do and they see that that’s an investment, not a spend, at the end of the month when the monthly dues come around for your chamber, or if you’re on a quarterly or as we are in an annual basis, you’re not thinking that the business isn’t thinking about cutting a check to cover expenses. They’re doing it because they’re investing in the community. And if they are,

and they’re so enthusiastic. The third component is delight. They’re so delighted in what is being offered by the Chamber of Commerce and what you’re doing and what you’re giving back to the community. They’re so delighted, they’re gonna come full circle and attract others that you don’t know. These might be neighbors, these might be business associates, they could be outside of your geography, but see the value of being involved in your community because you have a series of

customers in the community that would be a fit or the business connections or even just the friendships that are developed might be attractive enough that, there you go. There’s the graphic. That’s the perfect graphic. So attract at the top, engage as you come around the lower right-hand corner of the flywheel to the point of delight. And once you’re delighted, you become an ambassador.

just like you would on your fine dining restaurant that you make a suggestion, hey, you got to go to such and such a restaurant when you’re in our community. You’re so delighted you become an ambassador. Many chambers of commerce have ambassador groups. They have a small group of eight or 10 individuals who are charged with wearing a badge on their shirt or their jacket that says ambassador.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (17:52.091)
I want our chamber members to all be ambassadors, because if they’re all working together, that flywheel spins faster and faster and faster than if we just have a handful. And that’s the concept that I’ve been teaching Brandon and that we’ve been promoting as a chamber of commerce for the last five years.

Brandon Burton (18:12.29)
But as you delight the people, it closes that wheel where the delight goes back to attract and just it starts that that whole cycle over again with those new people that are being introduced to what the chamber has to offer.

And when I think of a flywheel, think of it’s a way of applying leverage really. I mean, you have a goal and you’re trying to get there either quicker or more efficiently and the leverage that can be provided as you shared with the attract, engage and delight is going to kind of have that focus all around the growth and applies that leverage to the growth.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (18:50.256)
Absolutely. And there’s two significant additional components to this messaging. First off is that in traditional chambers of commerce, there’s a membership director, somebody who’s going out into the community and I’m just going to use air quotes, selling memberships to the chamber of commerce. And somebody can be sold on the idea of being involved in the chamber of commerce, but if they’re not engaged for the right reason, they’re not going to necessarily be delighted. And so when the

time for their reinvestment comes up, it’s a membership, just like a gym membership. I didn’t really use it, I didn’t really see any value to it, so no, I’m not gonna do that again. So we don’t do that. I don’t go door to door, nor does my team go door to door saying, hey, do wanna be a part of the Chamber of Commerce? We let the flywheel just naturally take place. And so the referrals that come in, or the people that are attracted around the

the side of the wheel by those that are delighted are far more interested in being involved, much like a fraternity or a sorority would be. You’re inviting them and they feel welcome. That’s different than selling them on a membership. Second thing is that it eliminates a sales funnel. A lot of businesses look at a sales funnel and they go, let’s get as many people in the top part of the funnel as we can. And then we’ll do something in the middle.

to try to get them out at the bottom as a new member or as a client. Well, once you get them, so to speak, you gotta go do something else with them. And getting them doesn’t sound like it’s very attractive. I see the look on your face. You don’t sound very sold on that idea, Brandon.

Brandon Burton (20:38.446)
Well, and I’ve heard different business owners, different from a wide array of different types of businesses. But if when they have that focus of the sales funnel, they always have to keep upping the ante of what’s that next level that we can sell? What’s that next? And then you get into the, especially with online business, you see a lot of this where they have their high ticket items. It’s a $20,000 mastermind membership or something.

And something ridiculous that only, you know, one or 2 % of anybody who enters that funnel is going to get there. But as long as they spend money, they keep finding what’s that next level that we can keep extracting money out of them is what it ends up being rather than providing that value and showing them that there’s a reason that you’re here and this is what we’re doing for you and keeping that going as a circle. So yes, that’s resonating with me very well.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (21:37.331)
Yeah, and what ultimately happens is, again, couple things that are hugely beneficial. Number one, your rate of retention is significantly higher because they see it as an investment and a continuation of a relationship. You also decrease the amount of chasing that you’re doing to phone calls. Hey, are you interested in joining the change? Hey, did you get my email?

Hey, you know, it sounds kind of cheesy, but it’s far more professional if you’re inviting a friend to a business networking event or to a women’s luncheon or to, you know, to a large fundraiser or awards dinner. If you’re inviting them as opposed to selling them on the idea of, you know, you hear the difference there, Brandon? Yeah.

Brandon Burton (22:32.706)
Yeah, yeah, it’s selling versus inviting. Like, what do you want to be involved with, right?

Dave Moravec – Colerain (22:38.472)
Yeah, exactly. And again, it’s something that we’ve actually been tracking is the number one reason, and this goes back to the good to great flywheel. Among the first things we realized was that each chamber member has a different reason for being involved in a chamber of commerce. So somebody who comes for our ancillary benefits and insurance programs or workers comp may not be interested in networking. And somebody who’s interested in networking

may not be interested in giving their time back to the community and engaging with nonprofits or becoming a board member. Each has a different reason for being involved. So we actually track that in our CRM and in Chambermaster. And the second part of our flywheel is actually engaging them and making sure that that component is fulfilled. So if we’re not providing enough networking opportunities for those that are

interested in networking, they’re going to naturally go away. If we’re not providing enough marketing opportunities to sponsor and get people’s logos out in front of the community, they’re not going to see the Chamber of Commerce as having value. So we make sure that we’ve not just identified what it is, but fulfilled the promise that we’ve made to them and we’re going to create that value.

when we add value to it through innovation and through relationship building, all of a sudden there’s more value associated with that membership or that investment. And that value adds to the flywheel. And the last component of our flywheel is actually being able to tell that story through marketing. Because if we’re not attracting others by telling that story of, hey, you can be involved in this networking thing and

We had a chamber member not too long ago, sold her first million dollar account. Well, being able to tell that story to other people and that she could share that on our sales summit, all of a sudden people go, wow, hey, what can I learn from this person? And it just attracts more attention and more people to us.

Brandon Burton (24:58.862)
Yeah. So one thing that comes to mind is with the flywheel and trying to get people engaged. the attract and then engage. I’ve heard it said before that trying to find a quick win for somebody, you somebody comes into the organization, they’re testing out a business, whatever it is. What can you do to provide a quick win for that individual to where they immediately see that there’s value in them being there?

and participating. So as you guys have implemented this and practiced this flywheel concept, have you been able to identify ways to create a quick win? maybe within the first three to six months, maybe six months might even be too long, but maybe within the first three months to be able to provide a quick win for these investors that come in and join the chamber and are engaging or trying to engage.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (25:29.563)
Yeah.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (25:57.683)
Yeah, I’m gonna answer it two ways. First is the traditional way. People are looking for ROI, right? They’re looking for that quick win from a return on investment. They’ve spent $500 on their membership and they need to get $500 back in value, so to speak. And that’s what you’re speaking about from a traditional perspective. That depends on the type of business that you have. If you’re a roofer,

and you get introduced to 10 people in the community or 20 businesses and none of them need a roof, you’re not gonna see a quick return on investment. I just don’t need a roof right now. So we actually talk about three-year investment in the chamber. Our minimum level is $340, so times three, that’s $1,020, just rounded to $1,000.

Brandon Burton (26:36.385)
Right.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (26:52.926)
If you’re not willing to invest $1,000 in your business over a three-year period as a small business, when there are so many other more expensive options, then we actually take it off the table. We suggest that you not get involved and not invest your money at this point in time. And people have actually looked at me and said, what? Well, no, no, no, I want to join the chamber.

I didn’t mean that. And so we’re talking about it as an investment. The second thing is that many chambers of commerce miss an opportunity by welcoming people before they actually join. So we actually encourage people to take a test drive, invite them to multiple events, not turn them away when they come to a second or third event and go, hey,

You gotta pay up if you’re gonna attend our event. No, not that way at all. So our quick wins are engaging them with the right people at the right time and the right place. And if you do that, all of a sudden they feel, yeah, I’m wanted. Nobody wants an email directly to them after an event that they came to and says, thank you for coming to our event. We hope you’ll attend another event.

Brandon Burton (28:16.854)
Yeah

Dave Moravec – Colerain (28:18.814)
Nobody wants that. But if their film number is on their thing, a simple text that said, hey, this is Dave. Thanks for coming to our thing last night. Appreciate it if we can help in any way, give us a holler. That simple. And people go, that’s a person. That’s somebody who’s actually thinking about me. And lastly, this is a good friend of mine, Bob Berg. In fact, I talked to Bob this morning.

He’s written a book called The Go Giver. There are a series of 10 questions that he has that you can ask somebody during your engagement when you’re meeting somebody at a networking event. But the number one question he poses is what would be the ideal referral for your business? And all of a sudden people are now asking themselves,

He’s not telling me about his business. He’s asking me about mine. And so now they can feel engaged by saying, well, a commercial, we’re do 90 % of our work is commercial roofing. And we look for businesses that before they’re actually needing a roof because oftentimes if the roof isn’t repaired properly or taken care of, it leads to damage on the inside of the building. I’m just using an example here.

I go, I’ve got a chamber member who I can introduce you to now, who may be in that situation, maybe not, but all of a sudden they go, well, he’s interested in me because he made that introduction before it was even necessary. At our networking events, people don’t go around the room and tell themselves about, our members don’t stand around and tell about their business. We actually engage the new,

Brandon Burton (30:00.035)
Yeah.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (30:13.766)
attendees to have them tell their story and have them be more attractive before they leave the room. So somebody will come up and say, you got a dog sitting business or you’ve got a craft brewery. We’d love to know more about that. But if they don’t know it because they’re standing in the corner of the room by themselves, shame on us for not allowing that.

Brandon Burton (30:41.9)
Right. Yeah, I think a lot of times these quick wins, don’t need to be that, you know, complete ROI on that, you know, that return of the investment upfront, but being able to get them a feel and a kind of light the path of this is how you will get that return on your investment, you know, by making these connections, by getting to know these people, by getting involved, you know, in a committee of some sort or helping to further the chamber’s mission, you know, in this way.

So there’s, think there’s a variety of different ways that they can feel like there’s a quick win because going back to your, your comment about just being genuine and asking about their business and learning about them, they’re going to realize, okay, Dave’s working for me too. So that’s a, that’s great piece of advice.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (31:31.122)
We also use the individuals in the room to help make that happen. So if there’s somebody that’s new in the room, I might introduce them to somebody who’s just joined the chamber in the last three months and say, hey, Bob, meet Sue. Sue can tell you what her first experiences were better than I can. And then exit stage left.

Brandon Burton (31:53.209)
Yeah.

And I guess, you know, having your whole staff just being aware of anybody who might be new as well. think that would be the worst thing is somebody comes and nobody talks to them. No chamber staff, nobody even addresses them. Chances of them coming back and engaging and getting onto that flywheel is not going to happen. So, very good. Well, Dave, as we start to wrap things up, I wanted to ask for those listening who are trying

to take their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you suggest with them in trying to accomplish that goal?

Dave Moravec – Colerain (32:34.106)
Well, as I mentioned earlier, a funnel of prospective members and chasing them down is for me the least attractive way to grow your Chamber of Commerce. My understanding, and this is a statistic that I was told and it’s to a certain degree proved to be true, is that if a Chamber member joins and in the first year then

drops their chamber membership, just like a gym membership on January 1st and February 1st, go, I’m not going to do that. My understanding in the chamber world is that it’s five years, five years before they’ll consider joining the chamber again. And if that’s the case, then I can call on them every day for the next five years and say, hey, you want to come back? And they would say, no, had a bad experience.

So we want to have that first experience to be strong so that year over year over year, you create a long-term value. And the value add that I will share and the bonus for me in the long-term value proposition of for-profit businesses is that if somebody is happy with membership initially, eventually they’ll sponsor an event. Eventually they’ll become a sustaining sponsor.

Eventually, they’ll become a board member. Eventually, they’ll become a legacy provider to your chamber of commerce. But if you haven’t done the legwork on the front side to build the relationship, none of those things will happen in the proper order. And again, I think the lessons I’ve learned in the SaaS world, selling software solutions, is that if somebody is really attracted to what you’re offering,

The other things that you offer will just naturally happen. You don’t have to upsell. You don’t have to tag them for the, it’ll just naturally happen. We had five sustaining members when I came in. At this point, we’re approaching 30 sustaining sponsors that invest a significantly higher amount than just dues. And that’s because of relationship building and them seeing value in their logo being

Dave Moravec – Colerain (34:59.696)
everywhere and anywhere through the chamber. So that’s my tip for the day, Brandon.

Brandon Burton (35:05.728)
I like that. But, and to your point where somebody drops their membership, it may take up to five years or more for them to consider rejoining. The other side of that coin is if somebody, if you can, you know, provide that ROI, show the value of the chamber, get them in the flywheel. And I think the stat is three years. If you get them in for three years, then the chance of them being life members, like for the life of their business, drastically

increases to like 80 or 90 percent if you can get past that third year hurdle. I think implementing a flywheel is a perfect way of being able to get past that point and be able to have them be ambassadors for you and be promoting the chamber everywhere they go.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (35:53.151)
I would agree with that. And one other point is that negative talk comes from people that you’re gonna tell a negative story 10 times more than you’re gonna tell a positive story. And if you’ve had a negative experience, you’re not attracting others that you know. And somebody says, hey, do you wanna join, or should I join the Chamber of Commerce? Nah, I didn’t really have a very good experience. Well, you wanna have those ambassadors that you were creating on the delight side.

that are telling your story over and over and over again. And what we’re seeing is that those that provide referrals provide multiple referrals. So they’re telling the story far more times than they would tell otherwise.

Brandon Burton (36:34.072)
Yeah, it’s great marketing. I love it. Right. Yeah.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (36:37.212)
And there’s no cost to it. We can talk about that for another day, but there’s no cost associated with it either. You just have to be genuine.

Brandon Burton (36:46.924)
That’s right. Well, Dave, as we look to the future of Chambers of Commerce, I always like to ask, how do you see the future of Chambers and their purpose going forward?

Dave Moravec – Colerain (36:58.578)
Yeah, I think you’ve had Matt Appenzeller on your show and I’ve gotten to know Matt. Okay, you are great. Matt is awesome. And he and I subscribe to the same mindset from this perspective. And what I’ve seen in talking to and I don’t wanna say evaluating, because I’m not an evaluator. I don’t put one here and one there. But as I look at the future of Chambers of Commerce, I think the challenges if…

Brandon Burton (37:02.648)
Coming up, yeah, he’s coming up, yep.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (37:26.738)
you’re not running the Chamber of Commerce like a true business, you’re putting your Chamber of Commerce at risk. And by that I mean if your expenses are more than your revenue, you’re eventually gonna run out of reserve. If you aren’t planning for tomorrow the way a for-profit business does, when they know that the shelf life of their laptops is gonna be five years, five years from now they’ve gotta have the money available to replace those laptops.

And I think those kinds of concepts are missed oftentimes, number one, because the chamber leader doesn’t know any better. They haven’t been mentored or shown that those things are important. But secondarily, they have boards of directors that close their eyes and ears to the fact that their for-profit businesses have to survive that way and forget that their staff, the people that are running the Chamber of Commerce,

have to be that way. If you’re not increasing your dues, you know, over a period of time, eventually it’s going to come up and catch up with you. And I think that that’s the risk that all of us have is not treating the business, treating the Chamber of Commerce as a business and looking at it as a nonprofit.

Brandon Burton (38:47.608)
Yeah, I think that’s a great piece of advice as well. Not too different from running your household finances. You take those lessons of having healthy balance sheets. Well, Dave, 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 about your books or about the flywheel or anything we talked about today. Where would you point them and what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect?

Dave Moravec – Colerain (38:56.734)
Absolutely.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (39:17.298)
Well, I have put in my resignation for the Colerain Chamber of Commerce. So you can reach me for a period of time at president@colerainchamber.org. But you can otherwise find me at DD, Dusty Dave is my nickname, moravec, M-O-R-A-V-E-C-5@gmail.com (ddmoravec5@gmail.com). My phone number 309-838-1947 will get me 24 seven. And I will pick up the phone 24 seven.

Brandon Burton (39:52.679)
There you go. And the books, Amazon, anywhere in particular you’d point them?

Dave Moravec – Colerain (39:57.82)
Yeah. Yeah. You can find them at salesmanagerforrent.com on our media site. Amazon will have them. Look up Echoes and Moravec and I’m the only guy that M-O-R-A-V-E-C with Echoes associated with it. If you like the books, recommend them to others. Write reviews. First time and new authors.

That’s their biggest challenge is having people to review them so that others see them and are attracted to it. So yes, I appreciate that. And yeah, thanks for the plug. I appreciate that.

Brandon Burton (40:37.842)
Absolutely, you bet. It’s my pleasure. But it’s been fun having you on the podcast today. I appreciate you spending your time with us and your experiences and lessons that you’ve learned at leading the Colerain Chamber and just from your business experiences through your career as well. So thank you.

Dave Moravec – Colerain (40:55.432)
Great to be here.

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Value of Business Advocacy Councils with Janet Tressler-Davis

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Brandon Burton (00:00.974)
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. Joining us today is a truly impactful leader and community champion, Janet Tressler Davis, President and CEO of the Westerville Area Chamber of Commerce.

With a sharp strategic mind and deep commitment to local business, Janet has guided the chamber to national recognition, making it a vital force for entrepreneurship and economic growth. Janet holds the distinction of being a certified chamber executive and is a graduate of the US Chambers IOM program at Notre Dame. Her leadership has earned the chamber multiple honors, including the Torch Award for Ethics, Chamber of the Year, and Business of the Year.

while she’s personally been recognized with awards like Chamber Executive Director of the Year and Otterbein Alumni Community Service Award. A lifetime resident, or a lifelong resident of Westerville, Janet’s commitment to civil service is rooted in a family legacy of public leadership. Beyond her role at the chamber, she spent over three decades as a group fitness instructor.

bringing the same energy and passion to the studio as she does to her professional life. Janet, 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.

Janet Tressler Davis (01:44.554)
Thank you, Brandon. Thank you for asking me to be part of the program too. Hello, chamber peers. It’s always good to interact with each other. So I hope you enjoy this, conversation today. Something interesting, Brandon already kind of mentioned it, but was a lifetime resident of the community that I serve in. So I know sometimes people make us as a profession and they move from community to community or state to state for chambers. And I’ve been blessed, I feel, to be able to be right in my home.

community to do this and watch the community grow as well as our chamber has grown. So I’ve loved every aspect of it.

Brandon Burton (02:20.556)
Yeah, so the question that I had is the group fitness instructor. You must have started when you were five doing the group fitness instructions, right? Trying to figure out how that math works. So that’s great.

Janet Tressler Davis (02:26.856)
hahaha

haha

Yeah, it’s been a long time. Even before I got married, I was teaching group fitness. So I danced all my life. then afterwards, I didn’t dance in college, but decided I wanted to stay active. And so I’ve worked for a couple of different locations and just evening classes or weekend classes is what I do.

Brandon Burton (02:52.502)
Yeah, very good. Well, tell us a little bit about the Westerville area chamber just to kind of set the stage for a conversation. I think it’d be helpful to know the size of the chamber, the staff, budget, the scope of work you guys are involved with just so we can all kind of relate where you’re coming from as we get into our discussion today.

Janet Tressler Davis (03:11.145)
Sure. So our Chamber of Commerce, when I started there 33 years ago, our chamber was about 250 members and we were in a small office of about 700 square feet and it was myself and one other person and she worked part-time. And then we moved different offices, in fact, three different times and finally found our destination and we built a building about 20 years ago and that is a 3,010 square foot building.

So we didn’t fill it at the time, but now today we do. So we’re very fortunate. We knew we’d grow into it eventually, so we just had tenants for probably a good 14 years. Currently our chamber’s about 817 members, and that represents a little over 17,000 employees. And our footprint is our school district. Our city of Westerville currently is a population of 40,000, but our school district’s about 100,000.

So that’s the foot pit recover. And so oftentimes, we do projects and work with the city, but they usually have a lens that stays within their city limits. So sometimes ours is a little bit broader than that. our Audubon University is in our community. That’s where I graduated from, but it’s a liberal arts university. And then we have a fantastic library, the third busiest library in state of Ohio. So lots of people use it. And their footprint is our school district as well.

And then of course our school district, have 23 schools and three of those are high schools. We have a city manager form of government, which is a little bit unique. Lots of times people will have a mayor type of government in their municipalities. And I think city manager form of government is nice because the leader of the city is not worrying about their next destination, like when they’re gonna have to run a campaign. So they’re elected by seven member city council.

which that is elected by the citizens of Westerville.

Brandon Burton (05:08.686)
Very good. Now as far as the work that you guys are involved with, are you guys strictly chambered? Do you have any of the tourism, economic development, any of that sort of responsibility?

Janet Tressler Davis (05:21.026)
No, we don’t. did start the Visitors Bureau before I started at the Chamber, but they spun that off and it’s its own C3. We were housed with the Visitors and Convention Bureau until we moved to our new office building about 20, it’s actually been 24 years ago that we actually built our building. We do have a Leadership Westerbill program that we started and then we spun it off on its own and hired an executive director and they have their own board.

And then we took that back about six years ago. And so still same kind of program, but we manage it within our office, but they still are their own 501C3 and they still have their own board.

Brandon Burton (06:01.932)
Okay, that’s very good. How many staff do you guys have? Okay, very good. How many staff do you guys have there in your chamber?

Janet Tressler Davis (06:04.079)
And then economic development is done by our city of Westerville. So, yeah. sorry. Yeah. I did miss that. Sorry. We have six staff members and that just grew this year. We just hired a membership growth person and spent, she does membership growth and special projects. And four of the positions are full-time positions. One is a 35 hour position and one’s a 25 hour position to make up the total of six.

Brandon Burton (06:33.72)
Very good. Well, that helps to have an understanding of the resources and the landscape that you’re coming from as we get into our topic today. So today we’ll be spending most of our time talking about business advocacy councils and we’ll dive into that in those details as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Janet, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, today we’re talking about business advocacy councils. So I understand that you guys have set up some business advocacy councils.

It might be good before we get too deep into the weeds. know listeners of the podcast, some are brand new to the industry. Some have been in it for 30 years or more. But just on a high level, tell us what a business advocacy council is and how you guys went about creating them and the value of them and so on and so forth.

Janet Tressler Davis (07:28.551)
Absolutely. My first thought about a business advocacy or we used to call it government relations when we first started it is that we represent businesses and if we’re not looking at the business voice and looking out for the businesses in our community, who is? So we believe we should be. So shortly after I started, we created a government relations committee and we never started taking position on candidates, but we did review and still do issues and we’ll take position on state.

and local issues. And I think important thing to do is if you get in that space is to make sure when you decide if you’re going to take positions is what’s the business reason for doing it. Because sometimes a school levy, know, people feel passionate about it because their children are in school and certainly we always have to pass those levies. While that may be important, but what is the real business reason? Because we’re a business organization. So again, if we are in support of anything, that’s the lens that we look at it from.

is how it’s going to impact business. Or whether it’s an income tax or a library levy or fire levy, whatever it might be.

Brandon Burton (08:34.444)
Yeah, so as you guys kind of dove into this realm of creating these business advocacy councils, what were some of those first maybe higher level items that you guys noticed that we need to kind of wrap our minds around this and get some other strong minds around this to create this advocacy council?

Janet Tressler Davis (08:54.81)
Yeah, we had our school at the time at Ohio school funding is a little bit unique. I’m not sure if every state’s that way, but a lot of it depends on property tax and we get some portion from the state of Ohio, but we also have to make up the difference at the property taxes. And you can have bond levies, which are for your buildings and then operating levies, which is for everything else to operate. And oftentimes our levies were for two or three years.

and then they’d be back on the ballot. And back then they were on the ballot like every other year. And it was just getting fatigued in our community. And so we really dove in to understand how they’re using their money, why it seems like we don’t want to keep throwing money at a problem if there is a problem, but how we really rank among other school districts of our size at that time. And it really helped that we had a committee of passionate people that wanted to do that.

When you say like, how do you recruit people to be part of the committee? When we have a new member orientation, you we list all of our committees, we have 11 committees, we have 42 events a year. So there’s lots of ways that people can engage. But as soon as you start talking about advocacy work and government relations, either people’s eyes glaze over and think, I am not interested in getting in that, or people are like really interested. So it’s pretty easy to find those people that are really passionate about it.

Brandon Burton (10:16.632)
Yeah.

Janet Tressler Davis (10:18.092)
And we’ve just been fortunate to have a committee of anywhere from about 10 to 20 people that will participate. this is one of our two committees of the whole chamber that meet every month. So we often bring speakers in nowadays and we might bring someone in about the unemployment compensation system, or we might bring someone in from the Ohio chamber. We always bring in a lobbyist from the Ohio chamber at least once a year to talk about state issues or if it was the state budget.

you know, what’s going to get traction from those issues that passed in the state budget. And then workers compensation while people speak about that. And then we also at the local level, we’ll look at like our planning department, our zoning department, because sometimes we get calls from members that they’re trying to open their unit next door. They’re open, but they’re trying to open the one next door that they bought. And they have to wait and wait for inspections. And then all of a sudden they have someone come.

and they miss their low voltage inspections. So now they go to the bottom of the list to come back and get inspected. Well, the whole time, this business is paying rent. They probably hired the additional staff. They might have inventory in there. And so we try to serve as like a go-between or a liaison just to call the department and find out, there anything we can do to push this through? Because we are certainly wanting to look out for our businesses and make sure that they can be as prosperous as they can as soon as they can. And I’m sure our city wants that too.

but they have policies and strict procedures, so we sometimes will intercede if we can. And that’s how we got involved with working directly with city issues, even though those are not ballot issues, it’s more just making it a business-friendly environment.

Brandon Burton (11:57.26)
Yeah, which is just as important. So my question was going to be around recruitment. So you address that where you see the eyes glazing over and you can kind of separate those from the ones that are engaging. But do you extend invitations? Do you just ask people to show up? Is there an application to it? What does the process look like to formalizing a council?

Janet Tressler Davis (12:20.729)
Yeah, we don’t have applications for our committees. We do find out if people are interested and if they either they could fill out a form at the new member orientation or not everybody attends member orientation. So we certainly send it out when they join. And if they indicate interest, we invite them to come to a meeting or any of our committees. They can just come and check it out and see if it’s something that they’d like to serve on. And then a lot of committees will have different roles and we have.

we break out into three different areas within our council. And those areas that we track, we determine those based on a survey that we send our members every year. And we always ask one question that is always the same is, what’s preventing your business from advancing? And what are those issues? Is it state or local? And if it’s state, we list some issues. If it’s local, we list some areas. And then people can tell us that. And from there, that’s what we track. So at the state level and local level, know

state level, it’s been healthcare, workforce, and taxation. At a local level this year, it’s business regulations, workforce, and taxation. And so the workforce, we dive deeper into that and find out it’s more about talent development rather than talent attraction. So we could talk about that. We have a big space in the workforce arena that we’ve been focusing on for the last four years.

Brandon Burton (13:44.278)
Yeah, no, that’s great. So at any given time, how many of these different advocacy committees would you have operating or being actively engaged at any given time?

Janet Tressler Davis (13:58.43)
Well, the Maine Advocacy Council, so everybody we meet the first Tuesday of every month and those smaller groups, they get together when there’s an issue. So if the state is having an issue come up about taxation, they would meet offline from another meeting and then they report at the main meeting. Or they go to city council and listen to city council. We have a few people that will do that to find out what issues are coming up at city council. So it’s all just they do it on the off weeks.

Brandon Burton (14:16.352)
Okay.

Janet Tressler Davis (14:27.723)
of when we’re not meeting.

Brandon Burton (14:29.206)
Okay, that makes lot of sense. So I know chambers are all about tracking data, tracking information. So you wouldn’t keep doing this if it wasn’t helpful, if it wasn’t providing value. So maybe we can kind of shift the focus to the value of these councils and these business advocacy councils and really look at where is the needle moved as you guys have had this intense focus on these different issues that have popped up.

Can you share some of those wins or where you’ve seen the environment shift in your direction?

Janet Tressler Davis (15:06.721)
Yeah, good or bad, when people do come to us, if there’s a ballot issue, when your community, if your school board or your city council, if they come to you, the people that are running the campaign and want your endorsement, I think that says something because they know it represents the business community. So we’re fortunate that people do ask for that. Sometimes right now we’re in the middle of a school levy issue right now and it’s a difficult one. And, you know, we really hate to not support it.

But you also, if you stay neutral most of the time, they think you’re not supporting it, know, so they really want you to support it for sure. we have to find those, again, those business reasons why to do that. So the win for that though, to me is that they find value in businesses. They wanna know what the businesses think and they want their support. The next area of value is that our Hope Bar members are feeling like they’re in the know, either because they can come to meetings.

or we do put the minutes out from the meeting on our website. And then we also have a legislative link that will put out, I guess, a section of our newsletter that goes out once a month if there’s a particular ballot issue or even a state issue that’s not even on the ballot, but it’s just something that legislators are talking about that we want our members to know or maybe write a letter campaign. And we try to encourage our members to write letters on supporting a certain aspect of a piece of legislation.

We also bring our state reps and our senators in once a year. And I just randomly, I probably have to invite 40 members and then we try to get 20 in a room. And we let that be the conversation. It’s not for the legislators to be telling us things, it’s letting them hear from their constituents. Like how is certain legislation impacting them at their work? Or have you ever thought about deadlines? This one lady brought up one time, you’ve got this deadline for me to fill out this form and

X and X date and you turn around and have to have, we have to have another report done two months later and it’s just duplicating information. We’ll hear about six months later, they came back and they consolidated them. So that was kind of a nice win for that lady. I know she felt really that they listened to her, which was good. So we call those, legislative forums and we just bring the legislators in. We also bring our legislators in at the federal level for all our members at a luncheon.

Brandon Burton (17:13.195)
Yeah.

Janet Tressler Davis (17:27.702)
So we do that once a year. So we do our congressional reps. But for the smaller level, you know, we bring in our state reps. And I think that’s a compliment when members can bring their state reps in and they come and they want to participate. So that’s been a good thing. We also invite our local, like city council chair and school board president when we bring the legislators in.

Brandon Burton (17:52.674)
That’s good. It’s good for them just to hear the discussions that are going on and what is important to business owners, business leaders. You know, how can we create a more business friendly environment in our communities? And that’s the end goal. And, and as a chamber being able to convene those leaders and those thought leaders to come together in the same room and drive that conversation that hopefully is looking and finding answers. So you’re not filling out redundant forms.

Janet Tressler Davis (18:04.832)
Right.

Brandon Burton (18:22.708)
over and over and some of the more serious things that really do affect and hinder business. So it sounds like there’s been some good wins for sure as you guys have convened these business and advocacy councils.

Janet Tressler Davis (18:34.795)
Yeah, and definitely open the lines of communication too, you know, because for the legislators, you know, they’re hearing from different businesses and they can follow up with them and or say, hey, you know, come down and have a tour with us, bring your whole staff or, you know, bring your management team or things. And on the reverse side, I think our businesses then feel that connection where they can call. They might not get the legislature, but at least they’ll get their aid. So having, keeping those lines of communication open is really great.

Brandon Burton (19:01.022)
Absolutely. Well, and you mentioned when they reach out to you and talk about, can you endorse this, you know, whether it’s a candidate or an initiative or something that’s on a ballot, it means that they see that you have some some influence in in the outcomes of these elections. So that does speak volumes to the work that you guys are doing. So that’s awesome.

Janet Tressler Davis (19:23.706)
It’s not something you put that in writing and say, we think, but it’s just that you earn that respect. And I think that’s a way to notice it, I think.

Brandon Burton (19:32.494)
And it’s place where chambers belong. So hopefully if a chamber listening is not there right now, that’s somewhere to work towards for sure.

Janet Tressler Davis (19:37.322)
Yes.

Janet Tressler Davis (19:41.919)
And I know some smaller chambers in our state of Ohio have said, you know, we have a small staff, haven’t had, I just don’t have time to do this. And it is hard because if you only have one or two staff member team, it’s tough because it is a whole nother aspect. But if you can lean on your members to help too. So if there’s interest, oftentimes they can drive the agenda. Maybe you don’t have to set that agenda the whole time, or maybe you meet every other month, but to pull together a group of people to be able to talk about business issues.

impacting their business right today that it’s just invaluable, I think.

Brandon Burton (20:15.51)
Yeah, and that’s a good point for chambers of different sizes who may feel like, can’t take this on right now. How would you suggest they get started?

Janet Tressler Davis (20:27.176)
If you can talk about either to your board, your executive committee and find just two or three members that are passionate about it, that’s all it needs. Because that it’ll breed others. They’ll grow it, they’ll help sell it, but you can’t force it. So if there aren’t members that really want to do it, then it might not work. But that’s the same thing how we started our Women in Business Network is there was a few ladies and we talked about it. I said, would you guys think this would be a value? And they did. And then we just did like an informational meeting and it just.

grew from there. Same thing with our Young Leader Network, same thing there. So it’s, think for anything, if you have some members that are engaged and you, it’s not mission creep, I mean, it stays on your mission, that that’s a great way to get any committee started.

Brandon Burton (21:11.458)
Yeah, I think that’s great advice. Is there anything that we’re missing in the realm of these business advocacy councils that needs to be considered or things that you’ve learned over your career in having these business advocacy councils that could be beneficial for others to learn about and to maybe just be aware as they try to implement these?

Janet Tressler Davis (21:29.769)
Yeah.

Janet Tressler Davis (21:37.279)
Having an agenda, we call it a policy agenda, documented is really important. So those three areas that I told you that we track, the three at the state, three at the local level, we define what those are and we have them in writing. And then we, as a committee, did that. And then we present it to our board. And I do that every other year. And then when the board approves it, we’re able to take position on any issues that impact those areas, unless it’s a ballot issue. If it’s a ballot issue.

then we take that position that we’ve formed and take it to the board for their approval. But it gives you some leeway and liberty to be writing letters, know, letter campaigns and things, because oftentimes if there’s an issue, you need to get on it quickly because the vote’s coming, you know, in two days or four days. So you don’t want to wait and have to go to get board approval for every single thing. So that’s helped us. So a policy agenda. And then the next phase of our policy agenda says, if you do endorse an issue, what’s the procedure?

How much time do you have to give an advance notice of your board to give them the information to review it? You vote. And then what do you do with it? So if we’re supporting it, what’s our role? Do we serve on campaigns like levy campaigns? Do we help hand out signs? Do we do literature drops? How engaged should we be? And then what’s the post evaluation after the levy’s over to review what our role was and then whether it passed or failed, what could we have done differently? So that’s all in our policy agenda.

And I think having it documented that way when a member might bring something with you like H1V visas, for example, I that’s really important for some businesses that have international employees, but that hasn’t, that isn’t one of our top areas. And I’m not a lobbyist, no one in my office is, and there is only one person really working on it. And so we just have to kind of put some roadblocks on it to say, this is the areas that we track. So again, having it documented helps that explanation.

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Brandon Burton (23:35.79)
Yeah, I think that’s so smart to have procedures in place when you decide to endorse some kind of policy. That way, nothing is just running ad hoc. You actually have a procedure that you’re following where there’s order to it and you don’t get anybody trying to override the will of the chamber.

Janet Tressler Davis (23:56.828)
Right.

Brandon Burton (23:57.838)
I was curious with the letter writing campaign. So you’ve mentioned that a couple of times. So as those opportunities arise, are you guys providing maybe like key bullet points or full on script or just an overall message? Is there any mention of the chamber in there that helps garner the support saying, you know, the greater business community here in Westerville is behind this?

What, how is that formulated as you push the letter writing campaigns?

Janet Tressler Davis (24:29.618)
Yeah, probably I’d say 20 years ago, we actually invested in software that will help you. If you plugged in where you lived, it would populate who your representatives are. And then it would actually have a letter. If you put in the topic and things, it would have a letter that would write it for you. And we did that for two years. Yeah, mean, that was up, but it was expensive. And so we didn’t keep it up after that. And so

Brandon Burton (24:47.79)
Pre-AI, that’s cool. Yeah.

Janet Tressler Davis (24:57.681)
And we didn’t actually use it a lot, but we did. So now when we have issues, it is bullet points, as you’ve originally said. we just, there is our Ohio Chamber on their website is a place that you can go, or you can even go to like your state legislature and you can plug in your address and find out your state reps very quickly. So we don’t need a software to do that anymore.

So we try to put that link in so people can find that to find the reps if they don’t know who their reps are. sometimes people will say, know, a letter writing, is that really good? I mean, do they just get a bunch of letters? Well, if they get a whole lot of letters, they have something to say, hey, you know, we got 69 or we got 500 letters on this particular issue. Maybe they didn’t read every single one of them, but they know that there’s some kind of interest or concern out there with their constituents. So there is some value in it. And then certainly phone calls.

We do, we’ll try to call, they won’t, oftentimes our legislators don’t take the calls, it’s their aides, which are fine too, to at least express our interest or concerns.

Brandon Burton (26:02.17)
Yeah. Yeah. But if you can become good friends with with the representatives aid, I mean, you’re you’re in, get them on your side. But to your point with the letter writing, you throw out the number 69, you know, if they received 69 letters, that’s a whole lot more than zero, shows that somebody cares about it. And as a if they were to dig in deeper and see where they’re coming from.

Janet Tressler Davis (26:09.467)
That’s right. Yep.

Brandon Burton (26:26.306)
then I think they could see, okay, this is a chamber that’s driving this, this is a business community, it’s affecting a lot more people than maybe just the 69 people that actually wrote the letter. So I think there’s still a lot of value.

Janet Tressler Davis (26:38.436)
Exactly. And then our Ohio Chamber now will send us information on state issues and ask, you know, if you will take support on it. And sometimes they’ll have all the talking points. So if it’s an area that we’ve already addressed, you know, we don’t just do it for issues because they ask because they might not be in the categories that we follow. So sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t do it.

Brandon Burton (27:01.698)
Yeah, that makes sense. That’s fair.

Janet Tressler Davis (27:03.973)
And you know, the other thing you mentioned is some things that do’s and don’ts. There are some chambers that will endorse candidates and we are not one of them, but people can. You can, as a chamber, you can give money to an issue, but as a chamber, you can’t give money to a candidate unless you have a pack. And we don’t have a pack either. But you know, there’s pros and cons, of course, if you get some meat behind your…

issues and you’re supporting individuals and they win, you know, then you’ve got them in your back pocket. My fear always is if you don’t get behind the winning candidate, it could be kind of difficult maybe to deal with that city council for a while if they knew that you didn’t support them. But certainly every chamber is different and I bet you people have great reasons why they would support candidates. We just don’t.

Brandon Burton (27:54.508)
Yeah, and ballots never go 100 % your way. So just be aware. Yeah. Well, Dan, I think you’ve shared some very valuable tips. I like asking for listeners who are out there and trying to elevate their chamber to the next level. What kind of tip or action item might you share with them in trying to accomplish that goal?

Janet Tressler Davis (27:58.85)
for sure. yeah, exactly.

Janet Tressler Davis (28:18.982)
More advocacy specifically or any goal.

Brandon Burton (28:21.359)
It could be advocacy or anywhere, yeah.

Janet Tressler Davis (28:24.54)
Okay. I think a tip, one tip is never have your board chair surprised. I always try to keep my board chair informed, whether it’s an email or a phone call. You know, we might have a one-on-one, but then two weeks after that one-on-one something’s come up and you still have to tell them, then you still want to inform them. I wouldn’t wait. And I always feel that if I never want them to be surprised, I guess, because if they didn’t hear it, why didn’t I hear that from you first? You know, I’d feel terrible if something like that happened.

Brandon Burton (28:54.744)
Yeah.

Janet Tressler Davis (28:54.939)
So that’s one tip. And then I’d say the other tip is that I try to keep my door open as much as I can. So if a member comes in and wants to meet or wants to schedule a meeting, I try to always do it because it’s their organization, right? If it wasn’t for our members, I wouldn’t have a job. So that’s how I view the value of listening to our members.

Brandon Burton (29:21.708)
Yeah, I think those are two great tips. I’ve heard the tip about not surprising your board chair before. And there’s a ton of wisdom in that because I’m sure there’s more than a handful of people that have listened that are listening that maybe have fallen into that trap or their board chair was surprised by something and they’ve learned that lesson the harder way. So if we can save people that pain, we’ll, we’ll try to encourage that.

Janet Tressler Davis (29:46.223)
Yeah. For sure.

Brandon Burton (29:49.634)
Well, I like asking everyone I have on the show about the future. So as we look to the future of Chambers of Commerce, how do you see the future of Chambers and their purpose going forward?

Janet Tressler Davis (30:01.933)
One I think is collaboration, partnerships. There’s so many organizations out there. Might not all represent businesses, but even if you look at Rotaries, really not as equal as us. I mean, not the same, right? They are C3s, we’re C6, but they take people’s time in your community. And for example, we have two Rotaries, we have a Sertoma Club, we have a JCs Club, and then we have our Chamber, and then you have other organizations.

it within your library, like there’s friends of organizations. And so people are always asking you for you to volunteer. And so I think that ways of events that we do or programs that we do, or can we partner with some of those where you might align? You have your uptown organizations. A lot of us have uptown or downtown business organizations. You have your visitors bureau. Where is there some alignment there? And then when you look at the bigger picture of chambers, you know, some smaller chambers, is it a value to partner?

with other chambers. I don’t know, I merge, sometimes you could merge, but we do that as a expo. We come together with three other chambers in our area. And I think it’s great to do that because it gives your members an opportunity to expand their network. I mean, they come to business after hours and luncheons. Yeah, but it just gives them another couple miles down the road of other people they can network with. So we do that once a year with three other chambers, there’s a of four.

Brandon Burton (31:16.866)
Yeah, cross-pollinate. Yeah.

Janet Tressler Davis (31:30.69)
And we have a hundred exhibitors and we try to rotate it around so it’s closer to one community than another each year, right? So sometimes you have to drive farther to get to it. And then for our young leaders and our women in business, we’ll try to partner with like neighboring chambers to get together with their young leader or women in business group just to, again, expand their network.

Brandon Burton (31:52.812)
Yeah. And I can imagine as you do those, those more informal kind of partnerships with chambers, like the women in business and the expos, it’s also shining a little bit of light on your community or whatever community is, you know, it’s at, at that time where these businesses that show up. Yeah. These businesses show up and they’re like, you know, I never considered joining multiple chambers, but maybe there’s value in being a member here too. So, I think there’s value on multiple levels in collaborating.

Janet Tressler Davis (32:08.099)
Getting to host it, yeah. Sure.

Janet Tressler Davis (32:26.297)
Absolutely, just learning best practices from each other is so good. sometimes I’ll have board members say, have you talked to other chambers around, we have an I-270, a freeway roundabout. And I say, yeah, we do, because we get together every month and talk. So it’s just kind of good to compare notes.

Brandon Burton (32:44.61)
Yeah, that’s great. Janet, this has been great. This has been a lot of fun. I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about your approach. Where would you point them? What would be the best way for them to connect with you?

Janet Tressler Davis (33:02.81)
My email address is jdavis@westervillechamber.com and my phone number is 614-882-8917. I’d welcome a call or email. I will be retiring on October 30th, but I do invite people if they still think I can provide them any value or questions. My personal email is jtdavis4943@gmail.

Brandon Burton (33:28.046)
Very good. Well, we’ll get that in our show notes and I’m glad we were able to get you on the show before you were officially retired and be able to document some of your experience and knowledge. But this has been very valuable and I appreciate you setting aside some time to be with us today on the podcast. Thank you.

Janet Tressler Davis (33:46.521)
Thank you so much. It’s been great and I really appreciate it. And I’m sure everybody will agree with me, but Chamber World, Chamber of Profession is wonderful.

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