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Brandon Burton (00:00.966)
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and you’re joining us for a special episode in our 2026 ACCE Chamber of the Year Finalist series. And today we’re joined by Britney Quick Warner, president and CEO of the Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce. Brittany leads bold regional efforts around housing, workforce development, downtown revitalization, and civic leadership.
She recently spearheaded Elevate 2028, raising $5 million to support an ambitious regional economic development initiative, and co-founded Act Now Lane, a cross-sector coalition focused on making homelessness rare, brief, and non-reoccurring in Lane County. Known for her tenacity, big ideas, and ability to bring people together across sectors, Brittany’s a strong advocate for smart, business-friendly policy and a more prosperous future for Eugene.
Brittany Quick-Warner (00:51.063)
Okay.
Brandon Burton (00:58.122)
Brittany, welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. This is a treat to have you back and congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a a Chamber of the Year finalist again. say hello to the audience and if you would, you know, share share something interesting about yourself so we can get to know you better.
Brittany Quick-Warner (01:09.452)
Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Hello everyone. Thank yeah, thank you so much. I am quite honored to be chatting with you again, Brandon. this was fun. We were a finalist a few years ago and we’re excited to be invited to apply again and see some of the initiatives that we launched a few years ago actually have, you know, some data and results and outcomes behind them that we’re pretty proud of. So
We’re we’re honored to be here.
Brandon Burton (01:40.187)
It is neat when you can see these ideas grow some legs and really start making a even bigger impact in your community. so I look back and it was, I think, 2022, episode 184 that we had you on last as a a chamber of the year finalist as well. So if anybody wants to go back and check that one out. but I do like getting an interesting fact about all the guests that come on the show. If there’s something that you’d like to share with us so we can get to know you better.
Brittany Quick-Warner (01:44.33)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Brittany Quick-Warner (01:54.264)
Ha ha ha.
Brittany Quick-Warner (02:00.238)
There you go.
Brittany Quick-Warner (02:10.122)
my gosh. I well I am currently pregnant with my second kiddo. whether that’s interesting or not, it’s kind of dominating my life at the moment. So I feel rather uninteresting, I guess is the I guess is the the summation there. yeah, I yeah, totally, yeah. No, I I’m originally from the Kansas City area. I moved to Eugene about 14 years ago and
Brandon Burton (02:16.039)
Okay.
Brandon Burton (02:27.676)
Just building a human, not interesting at all, right?
Brittany Quick-Warner (02:37.538)
Haven’t looked back. I love this area, this region. And yeah, just I I like the opportunity for a challenge. We have a challenging business climate in this state and so much potential. So keeps me waking up every day.
Brandon Burton (02:53.83)
Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. well tell us a little bit about the Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce just to set the stage for our discussion, help us get have an idea of the size of your chamber, the type of work you guys are involved with, budget, staff, just to help give that perspective.
Brittany Quick-Warner (03:10.062)
Yeah, absolutely. So our chamber is celebrating our 125th anniversary next year. so I’ve been a part of this community for a really long time. we have two entities that have kind of consolidated financials. our Chamber of Commerce, and then a few years ago we launched a 501c3 kind of quasi foundation and economic development organization.
Brandon Burton (03:17.928)
Thanks.
Brittany Quick-Warner (03:36.66)
so the combined kind of budget for our two organizations is around four and a half million. we are, I guess, just shy of four, if you’re looking at net revenues there. So we have about 16 full-time positions within our organization that focuses on advocacy. so we have a pretty robust advocacy operation, member services, of course, like a lot of chambers and supporting.
small businesses and business expansion in the community and then economic development. So that five one C three that we establish onward Eugene is really the economic development arm of our organization.
Brandon Burton (04:16.606)
Yeah, that definitely helps to give perspective. And I like that. So as we get into the topics and the programs that you submitted on your Chamber of the Year application, those listening can you know think about the size of their organization and how they can scale it one way or the other to make it fit. But being that this is a Chamber of the Year finalist episode.
Brittany Quick-Warner (04:29.707)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Brandon Burton (04:38.32)
I’d like to spend most of our time talking about the programs that were submitted on your application so we can learn more about their origins and how you guys have grown and evolved and continue to make an impact in the community. So we’ll dive into that as soon as we get back from this quick break.
Brittany Quick-Warner (04:38.421)
Mm-hmm.
Brittany Quick-Warner (04:54.381)
Excellent.
Brandon Burton (04:55.738)
All right, Brittany, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’re gonna dive into the programs that you submitted on your Chamber of the Year application. And I know the first one has to do with a homelessness initiative. if you’d like to tell us what that program’s all about and where it got its origins and and the vision that you guys had for it and how things are unfolding.
Brittany Quick-Warner (05:17.889)
Yeah, absolutely. So the the synopsis that we supported or that we submitted is called Acton Al Lane. This is a a joint coalition that we founded a little over a year ago. that was actually kind of the the second step in a a longer term initiative that we actually launched back in 2021 at our chamber looking at the homeless crisis in our community. So Eugene is the largest city
in Lane County, the county that that we reside in. And as a county, which is our our full MSA, we have right around five thousand individuals who are unhoused at any given time in the community. And that number makes us one of the highest, if not the highest, per capita for the size of community that we actually have. And so we
largest per capita in the country. so it’s it’s it’s a conversation that dominates or a topic that dominates most conversations that I have in the community. It it somehow always kind of comes back to our homeless crisis. And in 2020, we know a lot of communities face this, but because of the global pandemic and the shift in the way that communities were able to actually shelter people, the unhoused homeless crisis
so folks who were not able to find shelter just became a lot more visible and prevalent. And we had homeless encampments popping up across our community in our commercial and industrial areas that were really starting to just create tension between consumers and businesses and employees and those encampments. And so we were hearing about it a lot from the chamber and a lot of businesses asking, what’s the chamber doing about this? Like what’s our role in the conversation?
Brandon Burton (07:15.112)
Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (07:15.647)
And to be honest, most of those conversations or most of the my response to most of those questions is like we don’t really have a formal role in this. We aren’t necessarily being engaged. There’s not really a seat at the table for businesses in this community when it comes to this conversation. And so I went to our board in early 21 and I said, you know, we’re a membership-based organization. And the number one thing that I talk to our members about is homelessness. And we don’t have any say or we don’t have any kind of
engagement in that issue. And so our board talked a lot about it and we kind of weighed different options. And I like to to share sort of how we get to where we’re at is, you know, we kind of looked at one option was just getting really mad and loud and marching down to City Hall and kind of pounding our fists on the table and saying, you all need to fix this. but if I was being honest, I don’t I didn’t think that was going to be very effective. I think without some real engagement and understanding of the problem and actual solutions to propose
Brandon Burton (08:04.007)
Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (08:13.975)
I don’t think we were gonna actually make an impact in that way. And so, our our organization has some core values that we live by. One of them is bold leadership. And our board really said, look, it it’s one of our values that we lean into these hard conversations, that we engage in authentic ways and we try to find solutions. And so that was the lot harder version. They said, Let’s go deep and let’s actually figure out what’s the root cause of this. Why is our community sort of
Brandon Burton (08:17.98)
I’d agree.
Brittany Quick-Warner (08:43.363)
facing this intractable problem here and what’s already happened that hasn’t worked, what’s working, how do we how do we scale some of the solutions that are effective in our community? And so the much harder version of the two options that we put in front of the board, but definitely the right one. And so that kind of launched almost a six-month process where I actually myself went out and talked to over 200 community members.
nonprofit executive directors working in this space, public officials, police and and public safety officials, talk to unhoused individuals themselves, trying to understand. And I asked all of them, I said, Look, you’ve been engaging in this system, what’s working, what’s not working? If you had a magic wand, what would you do? And to be honest, we heard from a lot of the nonprofits in our community, especially the service providers who frankly are funded.
through our county and through our cities, that they had a lot of things that they would change about the system, but they didn’t feel like they could be the ones to actually voice that because of the funding model and because of the way that they were engaging as a service provider. And so they were actually pretty welcoming of the chamber coming into this, sort of as a third party, right? We were never gonna be a homeless service provider in our community. But we could ask some hard questions about why, why are we in this? Yeah.
Brandon Burton (10:02.258)
Yeah.
It’s like you’re doing the research to to be a supportive agency to help.
Brittany Quick-Warner (10:09.213)
Exactly. I I told folks I felt like an investigative journalist for that six months and ultimately it ended up with a whole lot of information and had a a member who said you need to write a report about this, which was not our intent when we started out, but we just need the rest of the community to understand this a little bit better. And so we at that point issued a state of the homelessness crisis report where we basically just summarized what we heard.
Brandon Burton (10:15.023)
Right.
Brittany Quick-Warner (10:35.735)
From all of these service providers and community experts, and then paired that with best practice research. and then we essentially put out a few recommendations. And one of them was that we really needed a cross sector coalition where more voices could be at the table in a problem solving mode. and especially the business community. Like we wanted to be a part of determining what’s working, helping to find innovative solutions, et cetera.
And so we first started by launching a business leaders task force where we brought business leaders in to help educate them on the issue. I’m a firm believer that there’s nothing more annoying than walking into a room of folks who have been doing this work for a really long time and you don’t know enough about the problem and you rattle off a bunch of ideas that they’re like, Yeah, of course we’ve already tried that. Right. So I wanted our business community, I wanted them to be educated enough to actually.
Brandon Burton (11:27.666)
Right. Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (11:31.969)
to actually hang in these conversations and to truly find innovative ideas that haven’t already been tried. and so we had that business leaders task force for a couple of years, which is really about educating kind of a broad business leader base. and we had over a hundred business leaders who over the course of a year, two years engaged every single month just trying to dive in deeper into this topic. Ultimately that paired with the service providers that we that we
we’re working with, we launched this cross sector coalition. So Act Now Lane is that coalition. it’s backboned by the chamber. So we have we’ve done the fundraising to staff a full time person who is essentially running that coalition. but the folks on that committee are business leaders, service providers, city and county government, our universities at the table. we have some philanthropy
representation. So it’s a good kind of group of folks who are willing to rumble with some of the hard questions that frankly in a community that is dealing with a crisis this big, if you can’t rumble with some of the political realities and some of the difficult decisions you have to make, we’re never actually going to move forward in this. So that coalition work is the synopsis that we that we provided and and kind of dove in deep to those the progress that we’ve been able to make together.
Brandon Burton (13:00.03)
Yeah. So I’m I’m curious because you have a a great perspective. You know, when you when you mentioned you don’t want to be, you know, the new person that comes in the room is like, have you tried this? And like, yeah, we’ve tried it twelve different ways, right? but being able to build this coalition and have people from so many different backgrounds, what type of solutions are you seeing come to the table? What what kind of innovation is there that that you guys are coming up with with this coalition?
Brittany Quick-Warner (13:08.413)
Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (13:26.977)
Yeah, so we’ve kind of the first thing I guess what we started with was understanding kind of the how how to organize and and communicate the challenge that the community was facing or the community was feeling. So we you know, we heard a lot of things. I heard like obviously the growing unhoused population, the public safety challenges that this crisis is
in some cases creating for individuals who are housed, but frankly, unhoused individuals are the victims of more crime in our community than anyone. And they deserve to have that that protection as well. But the thing that actually I think concerned me the most was this sense of hopelessness that people felt that we could even do anything about this. And that’s kind of where we started. I wanted to I wanted to address the fact that the broader community felt incredibly hopeless.
Brandon Burton (14:02.782)
Sure.
Brittany Quick-Warner (14:23.807)
About the future of this crisis for a lot of reasons. One of which is that they were just, they, they didn’t understand what we were even doing, right? What were we doing that worked? How were we making sure that we’re we’re engaging in the right activities? And so one of the causes of that was just the mass confusion of all the people who were involved in it, right? We have hundreds of nonprofits in this space, the city, the county, et cetera. And so we did the work of taking
Across the city of Eugene, the city of Springfield, which is kind of our our sister community, and in Lane County government, we had over a dozen plans that addressed or touched on how we were addressing the homelessness crisis. So if you have 12 or 14 plans to the community, you have no plan, right? It’s just chaos. They can’t exactly they can’t comprehend that. So
Brandon Burton (15:14.012)
Right. What’s the direction, right?
Brittany Quick-Warner (15:18.753)
We didn’t want to start from scratch and create a new plan, but what we did is we took all of those plans and we synthesized them down into one roadmap so the community could see as easily as possible what it where is the alignment in the work that we’re doing across jurisdictions. That roadmap really broke it into three different areas. The first is housing and prevention. We did a lot of research and a lot of understanding that the core of any homeless crisis in a community,
really goes back to the lack of housing. So it’s about the cost and the vacancy rate of housing in your community. There’s a lot of data that has validated that. And so we know that in order to solve our homeless crisis, we have to solve our housing crisis and our housing shortage. So that’s a big piece of it. The second category of activities is really around public safety and services. How are we making sure that on the streets, people have access to services and that we have created a clean and safe environment for the community.
And then the last is around communications and kind of system improvement. So within each of those buckets, we have some very specific activities that we’ve engaged in. On the housing side, it’s really about policy. So we’ve had we’ve created shared policy agendas across multiple organizations to advocate at the state and local levels for ways to break down housing barriers.
development barriers for housing. And so there’s a lot of work in that space. Our community has really kind of been seen as an innovator in some of the alternative sheltering, which in some cases is categorized as transitional housing. And so we have a lot of folks from across the country who come and visit some of our shelter providers who have created these really unique alternative housing solutions. So
Brandon Burton (16:57.011)
Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (17:10.699)
That’s a space that we’re proud of the work that’s being done. And it’s a way to help make limited dollars go further to actually find some stability for people. in the services space, we actually launched a workforce program that’s been really rewarding. So we, the chamber, partnered with a handful of our shelter organizations to identify individuals who are willing and ready to try to find employment and to get their feet back under them.
through employment. And we worked with organizations across the community to create workforce training programs that were specifically designed to work for someone who is living in a shelter, who has inconsistent or no transportation, who really doesn’t have the capability to be in a full-time program. They need the flexibility to have their wages kind of stay within a certain band. So there’s just a lot of of
A lot of considerations for someone who’s in a shelter to actually get back into the workforce. It’s more complicated than it seems. And so we worked, we have now four different programs across the community that have anywhere from six to twelve week training programs where the shelter residents are going in, getting trained on specific skill sets. So we have a warehouse training program, we have an industrial sewing training program, we have a bicycle repair training program.
Brandon Burton (18:37.009)
Okay.
Brittany Quick-Warner (18:37.933)
So these are really unique opportunities where someone who is unhoused can now learn a new skill set. And then we’ve paired with employers to once they’re through those training programs to be able to kind of slowly evolve back into employment within the community. And so that workforce program is a part of this Acton Lane coalition. And we have, you know, over 70 people who’ve graduated in the last couple of years. And yeah, some who have found housing because of that.
Brandon Burton (19:02.142)
That’s awesome.
Brittany Quick-Warner (19:06.497)
financial stability. So that program is just one that we’re really proud of and frankly is pretty easily replicable. I think it’s something that other communities could look at and it’s a way the chamber can really engage in a program that feels authentically connected to the business community.
Brandon Burton (19:19.806)
Yeah. And I can see that being a huge barrier, especially when somebody is looking for employment and they go through the whole background check process. And if if you can provide training and then have businesses on board to help, you know, on ramp them into employment, it’s such a a better way to help bridge that gap and get them back into employment. So I love that. Yeah, you guys are making great strides there.
Brittany Quick-Warner (19:27.371)
Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (19:38.155)
Yeah. Yeah, and just more sustainable. Yeah. Yeah.
Brandon Burton (19:46.419)
So I don’t want to spend all of the time on that on that synopsis, but I think we could. Let’s let’s shift gears over to your second synopsis. It was submitted on your application around the voice of business. If you can tell us what that’s all about.
Brittany Quick-Warner (19:49.161)
Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (20:01.355)
Yeah, this one, this one I feel like some communities I think can relate to the challenge that we’re trying to solve for and others, I think luckily on their end maybe don’t have this challenge. But Eugene and Lane County has just a pretty poor business climate. we are constantly struggling and and kind of pushing back against our government and political partners.
About what it takes to actually have a strong local economy. the as a state, Oregon ranks 49th in business friendliness on on these kind of annual CNBC rankings that are created. And so we have a lot of work to do as a state. And our community is kind of a a a testing ground for a lot of those, frankly, non-business friendly policies. So with that in mind, you know, our chamber has really
Brandon Burton (20:40.966)
Well.
Brittany Quick-Warner (20:57.717)
struggled and grappled with over the years, how do we change the course of this conversation? And frankly, we talked to a lot of business leaders over the last couple of years and said, look, if we’re not gonna do what it takes to get more businesses involved to really raise, to raise this issue and raise this red flag, who’s going to do it for us, right? It’s not, it’s not going to be some elected official that we’re gonna find that saves us that steps in and and
Brandon Burton (21:19.069)
Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (21:25.783)
convinces everyone else that this is the right thing to do. So with that in mind, we launched this five-year strategic initiative, Elevate 28, and engaged about 80 investors who frankly had been pretty apathetic about our community. They had stopped kind of investing here locally. Their businesses were contemplating leaving town, but they’d been longtime, you know, business community members. And we said, we need you to invest in this initiative. And the the number one goal
Is for us to really try to attack this business climate issue. And so within that, we launched this Voice of Business program. It really kind of has four different pillars, if you will. the first really is around helping to educate business leaders about the political process. if you will, I think there’s just like a lot of
It’s just mystifying to some people about like how would I get engaged and who is my local city councilor and what are the issues that city council or a county commissioner actually decides on and how could I influence them? So a big education component. and then we knew that we needed to try to convince people to run for office who have a business literacy. right now we have very few, if any, elected officials that represent us that have a business background. And so
We know that that’s a challenge and that we need to find better representation. And so we kind of went yeah. Yeah. So we dove in deep on that. We launched a political action committee so that we could financially support candidates who were ready to run. we have a pretty robust candidate endorsement process that we go through. and we essentially put together a a toolkit, if you will.
Brandon Burton (22:51.518)
It’s almost like who you’re gonna sacrifice, right?
Brittany Quick-Warner (23:15.883)
For individuals who are interested in running for office for them to understand what that even looks like. Because most of the time as I talk to someone about running, I can get this close to convincing them if we’re just talking about what it means to serve and what they would be doing. But the second we have to talk about how you actually get there and you have to run a campaign, they’re like, peace out. That sounds terrible. Right. So, and we hadn’t had any resources to help kind of shepherd them along. And so
This initiative really was us leaning in to build out the resources and the scaffolding to actually help someone stand up successfully a campaign. And so that was a big pillar of the work. Another part was just helping our business people build relationships with our current elected officials. So we know that we’re not gonna nor do we intend to completely flip a city council, right? That’s not at all our goal. We know that some of the folks who are sitting there.
They just need to understand business better, right? And we have a responsibility to help them do that. And so we’ve created really structured ways for business people to have regular ongoing relationships with our city counselors. so we have a liaison, a business liaison program where we’ve matched business leaders up with city counselors. They have standing monthly meetings, we’re having small coffee chats and just trying to build relationships, right?
I would like any of my counselors to have a Rolodex of business people that they could call at any moment when they have a policy that they’re contemplating about. And so that was a big a big component of it. and then the last was getting people actually out to city council or county commission to testify because we just didn’t have a voice in that public sphere. Our city, our our chamber staff were always there. but we were such a small voice amongst
Brandon Burton (24:43.442)
Yes.
Brittany Quick-Warner (25:07.127)
Frankly, a pretty activist-driven community. And so we knew we needed to have a stronger, kind of steady and consistent presence at those city council and county commission meetings. So bringing in business leaders, training them on what that looks like, and then kind of orchestrating a really steady engagement within those kind of public settings as well. So all of this together is our Voice of Business program. And just like year over year kind of tracking.
The engagement, we were able to increase business leader engagement by 220% from one year to the next, as far as the individuals who are willing to kind of step up and meet and put themselves out there for these different pieces. So it’s it’s kind of taking that bread and butter work that chambers have done and really putting it on steroids and figuring out how are we more intentional about actually
Brandon Burton (25:58.206)
Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (26:02.145)
facilitating and orchestrating that relationship building as opposed to just hoping that it happens organically.
Brandon Burton (26:08.68)
Yeah, you you guys definitely have your work cut out for you as far as the business environment goes.
But I love the these steps that you’re taking and and even going as far as to create a pack and to be able to endorse candidates and help people and get educated on how to run. And building those relationships with the elected officials is so huge because and I’ve said it before, a lot of these elected officials are smart individuals, but they’re smart in their area of competence, right? They don’t necessarily know the ins and outs with the business climate. And to be able to build those relationships and help educate them, most
Brittany Quick-Warner (26:13.653)
Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (26:20.833)
Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (26:35.467)
Yeah, exactly.
Brandon Burton (26:43.368)
Most of them can be a quick learn, you know, once they once they can understand what’s going on.
Brittany Quick-Warner (26:45.291)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the programs that we launch within that space as well is called the Get to Know Industry Program. this is what happens when you have like programs that have like a random brainstorm session and they move into like operation. You’re like, wait, we didn’t rename that. Yeah, so get to know industry, it is what it is. but so this is where we’re taking our really our key traded sector industries. So the ones that we know.
Brandon Burton (27:03.806)
We just spun that up. Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (27:15.189)
Are generating the most economic output for our community and pulling together industry leaders in that space and putting together a really intentional program where those industry leaders can help our elected and community officials get to know that industry in a way where they can then represent them better at the council table. Right. And so, in my perfect world, any of our city counselors or elected officials or public officials.
Should be able to rattle off the top of their head the key industries in our region and what their economic impact is and the number of jobs that they represent, et cetera. That is so far from reality in our community. And so we’ve now had this with four different industries. we have kind of a rotation of about eight that we’ll do throughout the throughout the year.
Brandon Burton (27:47.998)
Yeah, absolutely.
Brittany Quick-Warner (28:04.789)
And we usually partner with an elected official to kind of co-host it. So they actually have a buy-in to the program and that helps bring some of their peers to the table. But we get the elected officials out into the businesses. They sit usually for a panel discussion and then kind of a broad discussion, then to do a tour of the industry, et cetera. Again, it’s a relatively simple format and program, but it’s been transformational because most of these elected officials have never set foot into a manufacturing plant.
in our community. They just haven’t had access to it. And so just that program alone has already started to build those stronger relationships. So elected officials, it’s, you know, it’s demystifying business for them, just like we have to demystify public engagement for the business community. So it’s been a a really fruitful program that we hope to see grow from that as well.
Brandon Burton (28:56.744)
Yeah. Maybe another spin-off or pillar is math classes for some of these elected officials to go into how a business runs and how taxes implement, you know, how they affect how businesses run and wages and you know, salaries and benefits and all the things that often get mandated. So yeah, whole nother thing.
Brittany Quick-Warner (29:04.621)
Ich
That’s exactly
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yeah.
Brandon Burton (29:18.29)
Well, Brittany, it sounds like you guys are making a great impact there in Eugene and and doing the the very best you can. I’d love to ask the question, especially as a chamber of the year finalist, for those listening who are trying to take their organization up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item would you leave for them as they strive towards that goal?
Brittany Quick-Warner (29:38.081)
Yeah, great question. I think I maybe had the same answer when you asked me this three years ago. So so what I will say is when I got into this position and the the CEO position back in 2017, our chamber had six staff people. We had just under a million dollar budget. and we had a pretty small body of work that we were engaged in. And
Brandon Burton (29:41.776)
Okay.
Brittany Quick-Warner (30:06.143)
I knew we had more potential. I knew our community needed more out of us. but frankly, as an organization, we weren’t really set up to be able to scale and expand the work that we’re doing. I was introduced to the entrepreneurial operating system, the EOS system, by Jane. She was in Michigan West at that time. Jane Clark’s fantastic, we adore her.
Brandon Burton (30:24.184)
US, yeah.
Brandon Burton (30:29.0)
Jane Clark, yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (30:33.325)
actually it was about a year into my CEO position, I was sitting in ACCE conference and that’s that summer, and I was sitting in the CEO session. And at that point, I I came into the CEO position in a kind of traumatic experience. Our our CEO long time passed away. I was 30 years old. I was not at all ready or felt myself to be ready to do this. I literally never even supervised someone before.
Brandon Burton (30:49.053)
Yeah.
Brandon Burton (30:54.776)
What am I doing here? Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (31:01.877)
And so I was desperate for some organizational development kind of resources. And I read every leadership book that’s been written ever that year. Like I was just like, I have to find something that works for me. She introduced me to EOS and it it’s like I went to church. Like I literally feel like I had a come to Jesus moment. I’m like in tears in this meeting. Like, Jane, you just saved me. she literally gave me her book. I read the whole thing on the airplane ride home from that conference.
Brandon Burton (31:09.74)
Yeah.
Brandon Burton (31:18.908)
Yeah.
Brandon Burton (31:28.509)
Wow.
Brittany Quick-Warner (31:29.973)
And from then on, we’ve utilized this EOS system. And I will say, like we self-implemented in the beginning. We’ve had some resources and help along the way. because we didn’t have a lot of resources to kind of hire somebody to come in and do that. And, you know, I would I would argue we’ve probably done about an 85% job, a B plus job at getting all of the components implemented. But the thing that we were able to do really early on.
Was to really clearly articulate what’s our 10-year vision? What do we want to be in 10 years? And in that process, we said we want to have a $4 million budget. This process really talks about how revenue as a nonprofit, we shouldn’t be scared of thinking about what revenue is it gonna take for us to actually do what we want to do in the community. we knew we wanted membership growth, we knew we wanted to be a chamber of the year finalist. That was one of our goals. and then finally.
Brandon Burton (32:17.672)
Yeah.
Brandon Burton (32:24.262)
Awesome.
Brittany Quick-Warner (32:25.345)
Fast forward, we’re a couple years shy and we’ve already surpassed those goals. we wanted to have 10 staff, we have 16. so it was just like this really transformational program for our for our chamber that helped us organize internally, really get clear on what our goals were, identify the things that we needed to do to support the community better, and then make sure that we hold ourselves accountable to doing that. And so
I know what it feels like to be a chamber that’s like, I know we could do more. I have, you know, I don’t have enough people. I don’t have enough money. the other thing about really clearly articulating what are the resources I need to do what I need and having a stretch goal, having it bit be that big, hairy, audacious goal is that it helps you get more creative, right? If you’re just kind of thinking about incremental improvements, you kind of get to fall back on the easy things. If you’re thinking about a big jump, like how do we get from one million to four million dollars in revenue?
It forces you to get more creative, to think outside the box, to really hone in on the things that help your chamber like truly have a value proposition for your community. And so, yeah, I mean, we would have never imagined starting this 501c3 and establishing an economic development arm. Like there were so many pieces that because we were not afraid to think big and to kind of get really creative, it has helped us.
Brandon Burton (33:27.358)
Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (33:54.219)
get to a place where we can sustain this level of work and support our community in this way.
Brandon Burton (33:59.229)
Yeah. Well and I’ve heard it said before the revenue is a direct result of the impact that you make. So if you weren’t making the impact, the revenue wouldn’t be there. So I’d I love that tip. That’s that’s right. That’s right. well I I love asking everyone I have on the show about the future of chambers. So how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Brittany Quick-Warner (34:05.579)
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. And vice versa. You have to have that revenue to make that impact. So it really does go hand in hand. Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (34:25.661)
It’s such a good question. I think and again, it’s it’s interesting being from a community where I feel like we’re always trying to convince people why business is a good thing. for me, it’s it’s still it’s still that role. Like we really there there needs to be someone in the community who is a champion for for you know free market business expansion and growth that like truly
Brandon Burton (34:36.412)
Right.
Brittany Quick-Warner (34:55.045)
results in prosperity for everyone in your community. And if your chamber is not thinking about it in that way, I think we will become irrelevant. You know, I think that some of the transactional work that which our chamber still has a lot of those programs and things as well, a lot of those transactional programs, they just slowly become obsolete, either because someone else in the community has picked it up or it’s replaced, right? Like by social media. We don’t, you know,
Brandon Burton (35:23.165)
Right.
Brittany Quick-Warner (35:23.829)
It’s just the world changes. And so the places where chambers can find themselves driving a bigger conversation, those are so much harder to replace. and the access that we provide and the amount of information that we have access to that we can then give to our members, that cannot be undervalued. I think being the place where people trust we’re paying attention.
We’re not afraid to have hard conversations. we are willing to step in and wade into issues that maybe haven’t been traditional chamber issues like homelessness. I think that’s where we become more relevant. We’re become more authentic partners with more different types of organizations in the community.
Brandon Burton (36:01.618)
Yeah.
Brandon Burton (36:09.628)
Yeah, I love that answer. well Brittany, as we wrap things up, I wanna give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect or learn more about these programs, these initiatives that you’ve talked about today, where would you point them and what would be the best way to connect?
Brittany Quick-Warner (36:18.081)
Yeah.
Brittany Quick-Warner (36:27.863)
Yeah, absolutely. So our website, Eugenechamber.com. always a work in progress, but a lot of good information that you can find there, including my contact information. but I my one of my favorite things about the chamber industry is just the sharing culture that we have. And so we do not gatekeep any of this work. And I have been the beneficiary of so many other chamber executives who have been willing to sit down with me and share with me.
What’s working in their communities and how they’ve solved some of these problems. So reach out, brittanyw@eugenechamber.com. I am always happy to have that conversation.
Brandon Burton (37:01.522)
That’s perfect. We’ll get that in our show notes. But this has been a great conversation. Can definitely see the the impact and and you’ve got a spirit and excitement about you as you talk about these programs. So that that means that you know there’s life behind them and I I love that so much. But thank you for for setting aside time and and being with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast and really shining a light on the impact that you and your team were making there in Eugene. We really appreciate it.
Brittany Quick-Warner (37:11.883)
Hehehehe
Brittany Quick-Warner (37:18.093)
Yeah, thank you.
Brittany Quick-Warner (37:27.873)
Yeah, well, thank you for what you’re doing too, Brandon. It’s fun to tell these stories and I learned so much from listening to everybody else’s. So thank you.
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