Tag: Chattanooga Area Chamber

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

Brandon Burton 00:00.721
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and here on the podcast, I introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. Our guest for this episode is Charles Wood. Charles serves as the president and CEO of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, where he previously led efforts as vice president of economic development.

With more than 25 years of experience in economic development, Charles has built a career centered on driving job creation, business recruitment, and regional growth. Before joining the Chattanooga Chamber in 2012, Charles held economic development leadership roles with Chambers of Commerce in Pensacola, Mobile, Alabama, and worked in local government in College Station, Texas.

Charles Wood 00:41.473
. .

Brandon Burton 00:53.881
Over the course of his career, he’s led marketing, recruitment, and expansion initiatives that resulted in thousands of new jobs and major corporate investments from companies such as Hewlett Packard, Mellon Financial, and Volkswagen. Charles holds a master’s degree in economic development from the University of Southern Mississippi, completed the Economic Development Institute at the University of Oklahoma, and earned the prestigious certified economic developer designation from the International Economic Development Council.

Charles Wood 01:12.249
. you

Brandon Burton 01:24.021
Charles, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat podcast. I’d like to give you an opportunity to say hello 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.

Charles Wood 01:38.088
Sure. And great to be here, Brandon. You know, I’ve kind of, I’ve been involved in the chamber world for a long time now at this point, mostly on the economic development side, not running the organization, but excited to be here. You know, I’d say I love Chattanooga, right? All chamber execs love whatever town they’re in at the moment.

Brandon Burton 01:57.713
Hey.

Charles Wood 01:58.797
But if I have a second home, it’s New Orleans and I love the food and the people and the culture. so I spend a little bit of time cooking Cajun food whenever I can. And so we’re, you know, it’s almost Fat Tuesday. So at least based on the timing for this recording and myself and our VP of membership and then someone who’s on our marketing team, we actually did a, we do a

a lunch for the full staff once a month. And so we cooked this month. So last week I did gumbo. And then our VP of marketing did red beans and rice. then our head, our marketing person did red beans and rice. And our other team member did jambalaya. So we did a full kind of Cajun luncheon, which was a ton of fun for me. So we kind of try and, I try and bring that up every year, you know, during kind of

Mardi Gras and carnival season. it’s a lot of fun. Chattanooga’s a long way away from New Orleans, but so we’re, but love doing it and excited that ACC actually is gonna be in New Orleans this summer. So, yeah.

Brandon Burton 03:06.612
That’s right. So do those other staff members have ties to New Orleans or?

Charles Wood 03:12.589
Our VP of membership does, he’s from New Orleans, proper person in marketing, I think spent some time in South Louisiana, but I don’t think he’s from there.

Brandon Burton 03:18.32
Okay.

Brandon Burton 03:24.506
Yeah, but enough to pick up some of the culture and cuisine. that’s good. That’s awesome. Well, if you would tell us a little bit about the Chattanooga area chamber to help give us an idea of the size of the chamber, the organization, the area of work, number of staff, budget, all of that to kind of set the stage for our discussion.

Charles Wood 03:28.33
Yeah, exactly.

Charles Wood 03:46.23
Sure, and we’re a pretty big organization as chambers go for a community our size. So our metro area is a little under 600,000 people, but we have a budget of close to 10 million and a team of about 40. That includes about 10 people who are on our Chattanooga 2.0 team, which is a team that’s focused on cradle to career education and workforce.

pretty big arm of what we do. And they do some incredible work. Last year, we officially launched a college and career savings program for every kindergartner, middle schooler in Hamilton County schools. So that’s a pretty cool program that’s come out of the 2.0 team. We run a 128,000 square foot small business incubator with 30 to 50 companies in it at any one time.

And that lives under our economic development program. And then we run leadership Chattanooga as well. So a lot of communities have a leadership program. Ours lives under the Chamber Foundation. And then, certainly all of the other kinds of things that go along with the Chamber. So we’ve got about 1,750 members for the organization. So membership size, not too bad from an organizational standpoint.

Brandon Burton 04:50.864
Mm-hmm.

Brandon Burton 05:10.673
And.

Charles Wood 05:11.531
And then, you know, lot of funding role we have, we’re technically two entities. We’re a 501C6 membership organization, and then have a foundation, 501C3, where our economic development and our talent initiatives all live.

Brandon Burton 05:26.493
Very good. Now that definitely helps to set the stage and get us prepared for our discussion today. And today we’ll be diving into the idea of constantly looking to evolve and modernize as a chamber and as an industry. So we’ll dive into that topic as soon as we get back from this quick break.

Brandon Burton 05:48.894
All right, Charles, we’re back, as I mentioned before the break. really, as you and I talked before we hit record, we were talking about the lens that you entered the chamber space, that it’s been very much through the economic development side of things. And now you’ve got this more responsibility in your current position. And I think there’s a lot of value in that perspective. And in the back and forth, you talked about how it

Charles Wood 05:55.147
. .

Brandon Burton 06:17.839
it’s helped you to kind of develop this lens to constantly be evolving and modernizing as a chamber. So if you’d like to expand on that and just give us an idea of what that means to you and areas where you’ve seen opportunity to do that.

Charles Wood 06:33.396
Absolutely. And so we have a two part mission. The first is champion our member businesses. And the second is really focus on building a strong regional economy. But the way I kind of communicate the organization is really around our purpose, which is to build a thriving Chattanooga. And so you do that by kind of executing on the mission.

But the Chattanooga Chamber was founded in 1887. We’re one of, I think, 40 chambers of commerce that are on the wall when you walk into the U.S. Chamber in Washington, D.C., that kind of founded the U.S. Chamber. So we’ve been around for a long time. We’ll be celebrating our 140th anniversary pretty soon. I think I didn’t really think about that when I was first hired here.

Brandon Burton 07:06.557
Thank you.

Charles Wood 07:24.45
and we were at an event that we held, we had somebody come in from the US Chamber and they shared that. And kind of the weight of running an organization that’s been around that long, especially in a time of real change, right? At a national and international level, it’s a pretty big weight. And I think a lot of folks who probably watch this podcast, they’ve either heard of or read the book.

Brandon Burton 07:36.262
Yeah.

Charles Wood 07:52.874
that’s called Bowling Alone, right? And it’s a depressing book, honestly. It’s around the decline of social capital in America. And if you think about organizations like Chambers, right, that bring people together that are, you’re focused around kind of building social capital for a community and whether that’s churches or groups like Rotary or Chambers of Commerce.

There’s a lot of headwinds in our world today. And so as we kind of think about the organization and we think about Chattanooga, a lot of my focus has been around how do you work to evolve the organization to make sure that it’s going to be resilient and it’s gonna be, I think, a really relevant organization over the next decade or two decades out.

Brandon Burton 08:25.341
Thank

Brandon Burton 08:33.553
I guess.

Brandon Burton 08:39.389
Thank

Brandon Burton 08:45.821
and going to have to work on this. So there’s no harm in us working on this.

Charles Wood 08:47.882
And so we’ve spent a lot of time kind of thinking about that, looking at systems and programs and looking at how we change those to make sure we stay true to the mission and the purpose, but also are not shy about working through the fact that we’ve got to continually evolve.

Brandon Burton 08:56.925
and influence our research on the climate of the planet.

Brandon Burton 09:10.109
And I think that’s so important and to your sentiment about the weight of leading an organization that has such a rich history is you don’t want to be the one that screws it up, right? But at the same time, there is change that has to

Charles Wood 09:21.66
That’s exactly right. Yeah, that’s…

Brandon Burton 09:31.134
You can’t do the things the same way they were in 1847. And as we see the fast pace of change in today’s market, today’s world, got to be abreast of those changes and be ready for it and look into the future and not just react to what’s being presented to you. And I know a lot of chambers will do their Chamber 2030 or 2035 focus, looking five or 10 years out in the future.

which I think is great. I think that’s, it’s great to have that strategic focus. But I had mentioned before, I had heard an interview with, with Elon Musk, you know, this man is literally creating the future in front of us with this, you know, self-driving cars and taking people to Mars and creating robots to, you know, clean your, your kitchen and cook for you and everything.

Charles Wood 10:14.163
But.

Brandon Burton 10:25.185
And he talks about what he can see in the next year or two, but he talks three to five years out. He’s like, I have no idea what that future looks like because things are moving so quickly. So to that point, I think we have to be adaptable and keep looking to what does the future look like now, instead of what did it look like five years ago? Anyway, not really a question there, but just more of an observation.

Charles Wood 10:32.568
Yeah. Yeah.

Charles Wood 10:51.374
Yeah, and we, you know, we do operate on a five year strategy. We’ve, we’ve done, we’re kind of in the middle of our second one that we’ve done. And that’s really helpful. We’ve got kind of four, four pillars in that strategy. One is around economic growth. One is talent. One is innovation. And then the fourth is champion our members. And so, but you know, you’ve also got to think way beyond that, right, as you go. So I think that’s a

Brandon Burton 10:56.594
Good.

Charles Wood 11:19.324
That’s a critical part of the calculus that you have to have when you’re working in this industry and you’re trying to influence the outcome of your community over a long period of time.

Brandon Burton 11:33.095
Right, yeah. So I’m curious from your background in economic development as you approach these different, I’m going to say chamber topics for lack of a better term right now.

I see and we talked before the recording every chamber. Hopefully every chamber sees Themselves having some role in economic development whether they have that formal responsibility Or if they’re a supporting cast to you know, economic development corporation within their community But when it’s all under the same roof How do you see? Okay, this is a this is a chamber direction. This is economic development

because there’s so many things that can kind of blur the lines. And I know there’s your mission and all that, but how do you delineate where the focus goes?

Charles Wood 12:21.432
But.

Charles Wood 12:29.534
Yeah, I think one of the things I’ve enjoyed the most about kind of coming into the CEO role is playing a bigger role in influencing some of our more traditional membership kind of, you know, programs so that they have a strategic impact on our economic development work. And so we’re…

We have four big signature events that we do every year. One is a holiday party. That one is just a great time. It’s like our house party. There’s no speeches. I haven’t dinkered with that. But we have our economic outlook event, which we’ll have next week actually. we have an economist that comes up from the Atlanta Fed, which of course this is something chambers do all the time. But we’ve added basically a fireside chat.

Brandon Burton 13:02.736
it.

Charles Wood 13:20.891
this year that will be between the incoming CEO for our utility company, which is a whole lot more than a utility. They run all our fiber here as well with a consulting firm that’s doing a competitiveness analysis for us on Chattanooga and looking at how, you know, what processes, what incentives, what policies we can look at to make the community more competitive long-term in terms of economic development. And so,

We’ve added that component into that event very much in a way to try and educate and influence how our members, our elected officials are thinking about what does Chattanooga look like? Not just like what’s the economic outlook look like for the next year, but how do we influence what our economy looks like over the next decade? And so we’ve implemented that into that program. run a…

a program around diversity that we do every June. Last year, a big part of that program was centered around artificial intelligence and how we prepare our members, in particular diverse businesses, to leverage AI, take advantage of it and not get run over by it, right? And so it had always been more of a celebration of kind of diverse businesses, which is great.

but we really wanted to present some tools and kind of provide tools to our diverse businesses as they’re thinking about what the future looks like. using our events to influence that economic development lens is a big focus for us as we kind of think about what does the organization look like in the future? So that’s just a couple of examples of ways we’ve…

We’ve tried to take more traditional chamber of commerce kind of focus and then add an economic development kind of bent to that. And we’ve changed some of our other programming around to do similar things as well. we have what’s a pretty unique structure with area councils. These are almost operate like volunteer led chambers of commerce that cover a certain geography in the community.

Brandon Burton 15:43.119
Okay.

Charles Wood 15:44.382
And we used to have 12. One of those was not geographically based. The other 11 were. And we pared that down, which was challenging. I used the description of sacred cows make the best hamburger, right? So we were making hamburger out of sacred cows. And we kind of.

Brandon Burton 15:59.998
Yeah.

Yeah.

Charles Wood 16:10.273
required several of those to merge down and kind of, and so we, grew their footprint, but it allowed us to free up staff time. And then that staff time now we’re deploying. So one is we created an owners only council, which is very curated. So we don’t let anybody in. There’s no salespeople in it. Like it is just a peer network for business owners.

which has been pretty successful. And then we plan on launching probably one or two industry specific councils so that those councils will be almost like a resource for our economic development team. And then we also took on management of an outside entity called the Chattanooga Regional Manufacturers Association. So,

Brandon Burton 16:43.877
love that.

Charles Wood 17:03.429
If you met Bea in St. Paul, we took a page out of her book of kind of entering into a memorandum of understanding where we’re the management kind of association management partner for that manufacturers association, which has also got a lot of history. It was founded in 1902. And so we have a chamber staff person that’s managing that association.

Brandon Burton 17:09.359
Yeah.

Charles Wood 17:28.512
One of our economic development staff is heavily engaged on that from a workforce and economic development perspective, and so we freed up kind of capacity by effectively eliminating some programs so we could add some things back in that have, you know, I think that will create a lot more value from an economic development standpoint.

Brandon Burton 17:47.996
Yeah, those are great examples. I love the idea of all the programming having a strategic purpose being tied into that points back to economic development. And I think that’s something that could be replicated for any size chamber, wherever they are, to just say, you know, whatever the current programming is, what can we do to elevate it and take it to the next level and give it a purpose that points back to our mission and what we’re doing and really help to drive

more purpose in the community. And it goes back to that constant evolving and modernizing things. So you had mentioned earlier that the staff and everybody has, for the most part, adapted very well to change that’s been going on. And even as you’re talking about these committees that cover geography, you phrased it in a way that you expanded their foot.

Charles Wood 18:18.91
Yep, absolutely.

Charles Wood 18:31.044
You You

Brandon Burton 18:45.273
So instead of eliminating, expanding, instead of eliminating, I like that. Just the way things are phrased. A positive outlook on it. But what are some of these other changes that have been implemented, that have been received well, that are helping with that goal of evolving?

Charles Wood 19:06.348
Yeah, I think, and I will say like change is hard, right? And so make no mistake, you know, we’ve had some team members that have been here for a long time and it is, yeah, for them it’s much more challenging. You know, when we bring on new team members, know, this is all new to them and so it’s just normal. But it is pretty challenging. You know, another, know, we’ve been…

Brandon Burton 19:10.109
Sure is.

Brandon Burton 19:27.762
Yeah.

Charles Wood 19:33.7
Working really hard to leverage our leadership programs has been another initiative around that. And so we run a program called Leadership Chattanooga. It just celebrated its 40th anniversary. And that program has really been interesting. It used to be much more centered around building a network, learning a little more about the community, that kind of thing. But the curriculum, it’s an eight month program.

Brandon Burton 19:49.213
you

Charles Wood 20:03.549
And over the last few years, the curriculum has transitioned to align with our strategic plan. So I mentioned those four big pillars for us. So we actually have a session that’s focused around economic mobility. We have a program centered around talent. We have a program centered around entrepreneurship and innovation. And so we’re doing our best to of steep each class.

Brandon Burton 20:05.563
We’re going to have wait for

Brandon Burton 20:13.821
I’m not a big fan of the social service that we have. I’m not a big fan of the service. I’m not a big of the social I don’t know what else we can do to help most vulnerable people.

Charles Wood 20:33.348
in what that strategy looks like. So that frankly, when they exit, they become our champions. They become a champion for that work. And so by transitioning it into kind of overlapping with our strategic plan, that’s been a really big help. And then the second thing we’ve done is kind of tie a little bit of it to our government relations effort.

Brandon Burton 20:43.345
Yeah.

Charles Wood 21:00.589
So one of the questions now that we ask when folks are exiting, when they graduate that program is, are you considering, would you consider running for office in the future? And so, right, because in a perfect world, as a business organization, you wanna see your local elected leaders and even your national elected leaders come from a business environment.

Brandon Burton 21:12.891
Okay.

Brandon Burton 21:18.653
Thank

Brandon Burton 21:27.388
Yeah.

Charles Wood 21:28.841
And so for us, that’s a strategic opportunity. Last year, our young professionals group hosted a, so you think you want to run for office kind of session, did some training around that to kind of get folks ready if they were interested in it. And so I think, as we think about, how do you take

How do you embed your economic enrollment strategy into your leadership programs? And then how do you leverage your leadership programs to drive kind of that opportunity around potential future elected officials? That’s a long-term play. It will take certainly more than five years to do, but the goal there is that when folks do run for office, they get elected, then we become a resource for them when they’re in office.

Brandon Burton 21:54.077
Thank

Brandon Burton 21:57.982
and I’m to do some of that. And I’m going to some of that I’ve been working for the past minutes. So, I’m going go ahead and turn this off. See you. Bye.

Charles Wood 22:18.954
and that they’re coming into office with a good understanding of a lot of the priorities that we have.

Brandon Burton 22:22.077
Yeah, hopefully it creates an ally in those public offices. So as you guys ask that question as they graduate out of the program, what kind of response do get? Is it more of planting a seed or are you getting responses that are like, yeah, or no way? I don’t know.

Charles Wood 22:39.458
It’s a, it’s a, mean, most say no, know, most say we’re not, I’m not gonna do that. And it’s, I would say it’s harder now, right, to I think convince people that are in a business background to run for office than it’s probably ever been. Because, you know, we’re just, the country as a whole is so divided politically, it’s challenging. But we, last year we had city elections, we had a recent,

Brandon Burton 22:44.23
Yeah.

Charles Wood 23:08.942
a graduate from Leadership Chattanooga that came in as a city council member. He’s now chairing the Economic Development Committee for the Chattanooga City Council, which is great. And then we have county elections this year and we have one Leadership Chattanooga graduate who is running for a school board seat. So we’ll see if they end up in that. And so I think over time, right, the hope is that you have more and more folks that are willing to take that leap.

Brandon Burton 23:38.012
Yeah, that’s awesome. I love that. And just, think, asking the question, it does kind of help plant that seed. And as opportunities come up, they can fall back on the experience they had in leadership Chattanooga and say, know what? I could be a candidate, and I could help see through some positive change and things that would help the business environment. So I love that you guys are asking that question and doing the programming for the young professionals. That’s awesome.

Charles Wood 24:00.795
Yeah.

Brandon Burton 24:06.141
I haven’t heard of other chambers doing that. I’m sure they do, but I haven’t heard it yet.

Charles Wood 24:06.61
Yeah.

Charles Wood 24:10.146
I would imagine they do. It’s just, to me, it’s a matter of being really intentional. You know, I mean, you just, you’ve gotta be, hopefully you’re thinking several years out and you’re being really intentional, you know, with each program to think about how that program can then impact the community beyond what happens at the chamber, right?

Brandon Burton 24:31.611
Right, yeah, I love that. Well, I always like to ask for those who are listening who obviously, maybe not so obviously, but they have a desire to take their organization up to the next level. I’d to see what kind of tip or action item you might suggest as they strive towards accomplishing that goal.

Charles Wood 24:54.913
Yeah, think, you know, to me, one thing is, is don’t be afraid to change. You know, I think that as an association, we’re all effectively chambers are all association organizations. You can’t get too stuck in kind of what you’ve always done. It creates a lot of risk. so,

I think as we’re in the middle of a nominating process right now, and I would say, be thoughtful around who’s coming onto your board, that they’re comfortable with change and taking some risks. I read an article a little while back that was basically titled, Staying in Your Lane is Overrated. And it used Amazon as an example. And basically,

The idea was Amazon was a bookstore, right? For those of us old enough to remember, and they built this e-commerce website. And what happened over time is they had to build out all of this technology infrastructure to be able to sustain that business, right? And that infrastructure is what created AWS. And so they went from being an e-commerce organization to being an incredible technology company.

Brandon Burton 25:52.423
Great.

Brandon Burton 26:11.196
Yeah.

Charles Wood 26:18.584
And it was all because they didn’t stay in their lane. And so I think that to me was a really interesting kind of message, I think, to take from what is now, of course, one of the largest companies on the planet, but think about how a company that’s built this great business is still innovating. They’re still looking at how they create, right?

Brandon Burton 26:40.701
Yeah, I think that’s a good example of looking to where things are going in the future and say, yeah, as a bookseller, you know, they’re not the big online retailer yet, but they see that’s where the future is going. And they build up the infrastructure starting with selling books and then adding more things. And then they see where things are going, you know, more, you know, in a digital landscape. then, know, AWS get, I say, get spun up, but it’s more than that.

right? But they’re seeing where the future is going and they’re laying that the roads, they’re paving roads to that future. And as Chambers, we can do the same thing and we can help the businesses that are within our organization see that future and pave their roads. And that’s what it’s all about to be evolving and look into the future. So I love that response. Which leads me into my next question as we look to the future of Chambers.

Charles Wood 27:11.065
Yep.

Charles Wood 27:34.079
I think that, and I’m gonna plug a friend of mine’s book for anybody who’s met Amy Holloway, but she’s got a book coming out around trust and trust building. And I mentioned kind of this dynamic, the political dynamic, right? That we’re kind of facing as a country and even globally.

Brandon Burton 27:39.709
How do you see the future of Chambers and their purpose going forward?

Charles Wood 28:04.018
And I think we have a role to play around how we help build trust in our communities. I think if we can do nothing else over the next decade, I think thinking about how we work with our local government partners and the private sector to build trust. the business community continues to be one of the, think, most trusted kind of…

Brandon Burton 28:24.125
Thank you.

Charles Wood 28:31.295
kind of groups that’s out there. And I think we need to make sure we’re thinking about how we help build trust in our communities, certainly across the country as chambers.

Brandon Burton 28:43.461
Yeah, that’s so valuable. These people don’t know what to trust anymore. Even from scrolling through social media, you never know what I’m reading. Is this real or is this fake news or AI thing or whatever? So being that source of truth and trust is so important in today’s age. I love that.

Charles Wood 28:57.193
That’s right.

Brandon Burton 29:06.653
Well, Charles, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information or anywhere you might point people who might want to learn more about how you guys are doing things there in Chattanooga. Where would you point them and what would be the best way to…

Charles Wood 29:19.02
Sure, absolutely. So certainly my email, is cwood at chattanoogachamber.com. I’ll let y’all figure out how to spell Chattanooga. And then of course our website, which is chattanoogachamber.com is another good spot that’ll get you there. And then I’m on LinkedIn. I’m on a bunch of other social media platforms, but I don’t pay any attention to those, but I am on LinkedIn and reasonably active. So that’s another great way to reach me.

Brandon Burton 29:46.041
That’s great. We’ll get all of that in our show notes to make it easy to find you and connect. But I really appreciate you setting aside some time and sharing some of your experience and insights with us here on Chamber Chat Podcast. You provided a lot of value for us today, so I appreciate it.

Charles Wood 30:02.216
Thanks so much, Brandon. Appreciate it.

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