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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.
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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2025 ACCE Chamber of the Year Finalist Series, and our guest for this episode is Rick Baker, representing the Grand Rapids Chamber. Rick is a seasoned Chamber of Commerce professional with a career spanning over three decades, beginning in 1988 as the director of finance and membership at the Rochester Area Chamber in Minnesota. Rick went on to lead chambers in Newton, Iowa and in the Iowa, Illinois Quad Cities home to major corporations like Maytag and John Deere. Since April of 2011 Rick has served as president and CEO of the Grand Rapids chamber. His passion for supporting the business community was shaped by his upbringing in a family of business owners. Rick holds a degree from the upper Iowa University and earned his IOM certification from the University of Colorado, Boulder Rick, we’re excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. And first of all, I want to say congratulations to you and your team is being selected as a 2025 chamber of the year finalist. But I wanted to give you a chance to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.
Rick Baker 2:24
Oh, well, you know, thank you for having me, and I love that you said seasoned. I think that’s a nice way of seeing the old guy. It’s been a, you know, it’s been an awesome career. Otherwise I wouldn’t still be here, right? And we’re honored to be a finalist for the chamber of the year, and our colleagues from Topeka and Memphis run some amazing chambers of commerce as well. So just being a finalist and with them is quite an honor. So that’s something interesting about myself. You know? What people might not know about me is I’m also a licensed Merchant Marine Captain, and so I can drive some pretty big, pretty big yachts and boats on mostly on Lake Michigan.
Brandon Burton 3:13
Very cool. So little fun fact, I didn’t know this until just recently. You know, we’re in this world right now where tariffs are such a hot topic, and I’d seen in your bio that you were part of the Coast Guard, and I didn’t realize the Coast Guard was initially set up to collect tariffs from imports coming into the United States. So when you say Merchant Marine, that makes even more sense to me. Now I don’t know where I missed that in in my schooling, my education, but I found that interesting. Yeah, yeah. Well, tell us a little bit about the the Grand Rapids chamber, just to set the stage for our conversation today. You know, give us an idea of the size staff, scope of work, things you guys are involved with, budget, just kind of prepare us for our discussion. Yeah.
Rick Baker 4:02
So we are on a growth trajectory as a Chamber of Commerce. We’ve been very intentional about having our eyes set on a 10 year plan, and we’re 2028. Is that we will have reached that 10 year mark when we started our journey. We are currently, this current year, we’re about $6 million in annual revenue. We have 4445 staff people on our team. So we have a great group of people on our team that deliver some high quality programming and high quality interactions with our members. And one of our values is, you know, member experience
Brandon Burton 4:44
Absolutely. So as far as the organization goes, Are you guys strictly chamber? Do you have that it’s the tourism aspect or economic development, or what is the scope of work look
Rick Baker 4:56
like? Yeah, we are strictly chamber. We are. Master organizations, which, like in many cities, we were the chamber, actually started the economic development organization and the tourism bureau, but spun them out into separate organizations. The three of us work very well together. We have very specific lane of work that we do in our communities. I serve on both of those boards for both those organizations, but they are independent and separate organizations. So we are strictly Chamber of Commerce. We’re 137 years old this year, and very true to our original mission of being, you know, relentless advocates for our business community.
Brandon Burton 5:36
Awesome, very cool. Well, that that definitely helps us with the setting the stage, and as I do with these chamber of the year finalist episodes, I like to spend the majority of our discussion time on the two projects that you guys submitted on your chamber of the year application. I think there’s a lot to be learned from those projects, as you’re obviously making an impact in your community to be noticed on a national stage. So we’ll dive in much deeper on those two programs as soon as we get back from this quick break.
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Brandon Burton 9:49
All right, Rick, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break today, we’re diving in on the two programs that you guys submitted on your chamber of the year application. I don’t know if. You have a preference on which one we cover first, but I’ll, I’ll let you decide with which which program you want to dive into.
Rick Baker 10:06
Sure. Let’s talk a little bit about the first one is our office space itself, which sounds maybe a little bit funny. We started a journey back in 2018 that kind of referenced in my earlier marks on a 10 year journey of reinventing ourselves as an organization, and part of that had to do with moving to a new office. Our previous office space was very traditional. It was like where the employees came to work. It wasn’t a great opportunity for our members to engage with us. And so as we thought about our reinvention and rebranding of us as an organization, it felt like a great opportunity for us to rethink how we work, and I asked our design team that we hired, can our office space actually be a benefit of chamber membership versus an overhead cost for our organization. And so what we designed and what we have now is very much of a collaborative work environment. We have a work cafe on the first floor. It’s a coffee shop on the first floor. Our members drop in and work, and they come in between meetings, and it’s pop in, you know, beer from one of our local breweries in the refrigerator for late afternoon if somebody feels like they would like to have a beer. And then on this second floor, we have an a series of meeting rooms, and we had such high utilization that, like, two years ago, then we did an expansion and 5000 square foot expansion, and added additional meeting rooms, and we’ve seen our utilization triple. A lot of businesses. We are literally now the center, the hub of business activity for our business community, which was our goal to have our the leadership teams of our major corporations and our small businesses, mid sized businesses, coming in and using our space for their strategic planning. Nothing fills my bucket more than seeing the leadership team of one of our companies, whether it’s our largest corporation or down to, you know, smaller company, their team in their white boarding like, where are they going? Where’s their future? Is it we’re better placed to do that than at your chamber of commerce?
Brandon Burton 12:28
That’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve not heard of this type of a model with the office space before. Is this something that you’d seen somewhere? Is it just, you know, one of those ideas that come to you when you’re in the shower? Or how did this come to be?
Rick Baker 12:44
I get my best ideas when I’m driving. I call it windshield time, you know, brainstorming. And I think sometimes my staff gets a little nervous when they know I’m going to be in the car for very long, because I always come back with great ideas, right, right? But, you know, I mean, co working space in is not something that’s unusual for a lot of communities, but for a chamber, I think you know, making your office be the the co working space for your community is maybe unusual or unique. And I think you know, teaming up with our architectural design team, and you know them knowing what our our vision was for our space, that it be something that our members could benefit from. You know, they really helped us through a process to identify what could that look like. Now, they also made, made us aware, very much aware. And I think this is probably very typical of a lot of chambers, as they studied us in our old space and watched how our employees worked. You know, everyone had their own office. Everyone had their cubicle that was assigned to them. And, you know, in the in the design language, they were like, this, real estate, you’re tying up real estate, but half of but you’re only there half the time, yeah. And so you’ve got all of this real estate tied up, and your employees are coming and going, and so that allowed us to rethink how we worked as well as we now, no one, including me, has an office that’s assigned to me. There are spaces that I can go and work and be in an office environment, but it’s not assigned to me. I don’t have pictures up, I don’t have things that you know that designate that this belongs to Rick. So it allows us to have more of our space focused on our members and less tied up in real estate that’s being used half the time.
Brandon Burton 14:40
So I’ve heard of chambers doing co working spaces, for sure, but not having their office space be that that canvas right for that co working space. So I think it’s a very unique idea with 45 staff. Was that a hard idea to get across the staff that you. Won’t have your designated real estate within the office as you as you termed it before,
Rick Baker 15:05
yeah, we went through a process. You know, early on, when we first moved in to our space here, with the team that was kind of converting, and our, one of our office supply or office manufacturing companies has a process to help you actually go through that. And for, you know, there’s protocols that you, you know, you create that are kind of basically the unspoken rules of how you operate. You know, when you sit at a spot and then, like, how do you leave it for the next person? So we did a lot of training with our employees. Like, this is what to expect. And no, the conversion was actually fairly easy. There’s, you know, there’s, it took a little while in the very beginning, and I actually think it positioned us very well when, when all of us had to deal with covid and work remotely, we were all used to working with our backpack and being remote anyway, basically. And so it really helped us adapt quickly when it came to covid.
Brandon Burton 16:09
So that that question was on my mind, you know, first of all, it sounds like this is a new space for you. It wasn’t an existing office space. Is that correct?
Rick Baker 16:19
Right? It’s new. We moved down, you know, a couple few blocks from where we were previously, out of our Okay.
Brandon Burton 16:27
So then my next question was, with the new office space, when did you guys make this move, and did you have to deal with covid During that time, and, and I’m sure that had some, you know, maybe complications, but also benefits, as you mentioned, with already being structured with that kind of office structure. But what did you guys see through that experience?
Rick Baker 16:47
Our original move in here was 2018 March of 2018 so we were in here for two, two full years before 2020 came around in Michigan. You know, everything was completely closed down during covid, and so we were not able to come into our space. We were not able to have members in our space at all during 2020, for almost a whole year, then when we had to actually designate because, like I said, we have our work, work campaign, which is a coffee shop. Then we have meeting room space. They’re all designated differently at the state of Michigan during that time. And so we were able to open pieces of it at different times. And so yeah, it was a quite a journey. What we found after covid was the utilization even higher when people started coming back to work, when we did open up, and that that drove our expansion in 2022 Yeah, and a number of companies, because some of those companies were actually shrinking their footprints a little bit, and so leaning on us more for meeting spaces and things like that.
Brandon Burton 18:00
Yeah. And I’m sure things had to be thought through as far as, like sanitizing a workspace before you leave. And, you know, the stuff we don’t want to think about anymore. So yeah, we won’t dwell on that part of it so much. But I like the idea of you guys being so well positioned, you know, ahead of covid to as these changes happen that, you know, other offices kind of scaled down, and people working from home, but maybe at home, they don’t really have a space to work from, so to be able to utilize their chamber membership to come to the chamber office and have space there to be able to work do you see a number of people that come consistently, like every day or multiple times a week, or what’s that? That info like
Rick Baker 18:44
we do, we do have some, what we call frequent flyers. We have folks that are here almost every day, if not every day. And we’ve seen, you know, kind of unintention, not necessarily the intent of our our thoughts originally, but have embraced it. We’ve seen kind of some incubation of some small businesses that that’s then as they finally got their own space, they moved out. We’ve seen that multiple times where, you know, companies that got started, and then they finally get to 345, employees, and they find their own they get their own office space, and move out, and they still come back and use our meeting rooms. But God, we have some companies that are here quite a bit, and we’re actually thinking next, what’s next for us? And we’ve done a we’ve met with our frequent flyers, especially to find out, like, what else could we do to make this even more valuable to you as a chamber member,
Brandon Burton 19:42
yeah. So I love hearing the stories of incubators getting started and spun off. And I know for a lot of these incubators, these brand new businesses, having that physical space and even an address is so important for them getting started. Are they? Able to utilize the address the building, or how is that factored into utilizing the space?
Rick Baker 20:06
So actually, right now, no, they do not use it as their mailing address. That is something we’re thinking about as an add on benefit to probably a cost to some of those that are more frequent flyers, but they can do pretty much everything other than, you know, have access to the space you know, during our office hours, and they don’t have it as their mailing address unless we work out a special when we that’s kind of our next phase,
Brandon Burton 20:37
yeah, so from a tactical standpoint, do people Reserve meeting rooms and spaces? You mentioned they’re classified in different areas. So is that something they go online and book a room? Or how does that work?
Rick Baker 20:53
Yeah, we have, we have a person on our team that manages all of the meeting room space, because we now have like, 15 meeting rooms. And you know, it’s so and most of them are full every day, all day, with different clients. And so it’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of people, lot of energy, lot of activity in this in our office, which I love. And so it takes, you know, we had to have a person on our team that could manage all of that, make sure that they got a good customer experience, and provide them, you know, with the room set up and there’s, like I said, there’s about 15 different meeting rooms, and they’re laid out differently, different sizes, depending on what the need is of our members,
Brandon Burton 21:37
yeah, very cool for a chamber listening who might be interested in doing something similar. Has is there big lessons you guys learned in setting up this kind of an office space that they might want to take note of before venturing into something like this?
Rick Baker 21:56
Um, you know, I think, I think a lot of it depends on the the team in place, and are they willing to give up their actual designated office. It takes, you know, some learning, and you know, willingness to do that. I guess you could have that. It would just cause you would just have to have much more square footage to be able to accommodate both, you have to be willing to have this level of activity in your office. To have there is a lot of activity, and there’s a certain level of now, our team loves it, you know. And most a lot of the people that have been hired in, they like this environment. They know what they’re coming into. So yeah, but there’s a certain level of stress when you have guests, you know, like, if you have guests in your home for a weekend, you know that there’s, like, a it’s you can’t just relax and sit around like you normally would. And so there’s a just a little extra level of activity.
Brandon Burton 23:03
Call it attention. Yeah, you’re more attention.
Rick Baker 23:07
Be willing to work with and have around you. I love the energy our team. Loves the energy the interactions that happen in our with between our members and our staff and between members that are in our space. We hear that all the time. It’s like, oh my god, it’s a great one of our members referred to us as the town square like this is where you go if you want to see people that you’re you’ve been trying
Brandon Burton 23:31
to connect with. That’s awesome. I love that. So you’d mentioned that this is a benefit of membership. Is it a membership tier? Are all members welcome to? How does that structure work?
Rick Baker 23:44
So all members are welcome into our space. And then it’s a different membership levels of access to meeting rooms. And then maybe, you know, at the highest level, not have to pay for the meeting rooms in addition to your membership. So you get x number of utilizations a year based on your membership investment
Brandon Burton 24:03
levels. Yeah, very cool. Well, let’s shift gears to the the other program that you guys submitted on your application, if you’d like to to introduce with that program, is
Rick Baker 24:13
about, yeah. So like many chambers, you know, we are, we’re always working to create a community that’s vibrant and attractive and will attract people and attract business and and we’ve been on a journey here in Grand Rapids for number of years, and we’re so we’re at our next phase. And so it’s what we presented, was a couple of transformational projects. Is how we refer to them, as they’re transformational for our community. In those two projects are 14,000 seat empathy outdoor amphitheater, a entertainment venue, and that is in our downtown, and then a professional soccer stadium, which is also in our downtown. Area again, trying to continue our journey of creating high energy, high traffic, kind of attractions that then support our entertainment businesses, the so you know, hospitality businesses that we have in our downtown area as well as, you know, find, you know, adding additional tools in our toolbox, like, if you might say, for attracting great talent to our region.
Brandon Burton 25:29
Yeah, definitely that that place making aspect of making Grand Rapids a great place to live and entertain and and all of that. So you’d mentioned you guys are working through like this 10 year vision. Was there a capital campaign associated with that to execute on these projects? Or, I imagine the soccer stadium has something to do with the soccer team. Would would help finance with that. But how’s it coming
Rick Baker 25:57
together? Yeah, so our, you know, big piece of what we had to do was part of the capital stack to make these projects a reality. Was what we’ve used previously for some of our other projects as a portion of our hotel motel tax. And we needed to do through multiple steps, and part of that was getting legislation passed at the state level that would allow us to increase the hotel, motel tax that we use. We had to get approval first at this local, city and county boards so that we could go and ask for our legislature to change our ability to increase our tax and once we got through each one of those steps, we had to run a ballot campaign with our local voters to get approval for the increase. And of course, there’s a lot of messaging and a lot of things that you need to do to make sure that they understand it’s like, this is a hotel, motel, tax. It’s an attacks on your property. It’s not, you know, there’s
Brandon Burton 27:06
people your tax and they freak out a little bit. Yeah, people
Rick Baker 27:09
see tax increase and they, you know, there’s a certain reaction that you get immediately. And so there was a lot of work that our team had to do with partners in the community to make sure that the message was very clear, and people understood what the what they were supporting, and what they were helping to invest in for the future of our community. And so we were pleased that we were able to get a yes at each one of those steps along the way. There was a lot of pressure and timing that that was important because you, you know, you design like significantly, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investment and costs change quickly, you know, a few years delay and the changes, the costs can change. And so we wanted to keep things moving, and so that the estimates for costs were accurate and we didn’t have any surprises later.
Brandon Burton 28:06
Yeah, when this is part of a 10 year plan and vision like, man, a lot of the costs have changed within that 10 year span. But it’s got to be very satisfying to see this, you know, coming from a dream or vision, a plan, to to something that’s materializing. What’s the timeline look like for completion on the amphitheater in the stadium?
Rick Baker 28:27
Yeah, so the amphitheater is well under construction. It started sooner. That was the first project that we got going on from a construction standpoint, and the first concert will be in May of 2026 Okay, and so, you know, there,
Brandon Burton 28:48
do you know who’s coming with? Not yet, okay, yeah, we might be able to pre sell some tickets here.
Rick Baker 28:56
I would think that it would be quite an honor for any entertainer to be the first entertainer in a new venue. And we have a, you know, our we have a great contract partnership with the organization that runs our arena and our convention center, and they’re now contracted to run the amphitheater and using Live Nation to, you know, work all the deals with the different entertainment groups. So, yeah, I’m sure that’ll be exciting, and it’ll be a hot ticket for sure.
Brandon Burton 29:29
Absolutely sounds very exciting. Yeah,
Rick Baker 29:33
soccer stadium is a little bit they’re just starting construction now. They’re doing groundwork and site work. They just started it recently, and so that’ll be about a two year build out before that’s completed some of the other steps that are coming along with that project. And we haven’t announced the the name of the team yet, you know, or team ownership, any of that kind of stuff. And so we’ve, I think, you know, we’ve been phasing it out, just. Kind of keep the attention and excitement, but we’ll be doing that very soon, because it’s important, because there’s material that needs to be bought and you want it to align with the colors of the team and right like that. And so that stuff will be coming along in the near future.
Brandon Burton 30:16
Yeah, that’s really cool. Well, Rick, as we begin to wrap things up here. I wanted to ask on behalf of you know, chambers listening, who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you suggest for them as they try to work towards that goal
Rick Baker 30:35
while we I think for us, what really has helped us as an organization, and that be at the beginning of this whole journey of re reinventing ourselves, as I mentioned back in 2018 and we also started implementing Eos, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And there’s other operating systems out there Eos, what I like about it is, it is not hard, you know, it’s very simple. It gives you a set of tools. But what the most important thing it does is it gets the whole team laser focused on the on the goal. You know, everyone is aligned. And, you know, here’s who we are as an organization. Our values are alive. They’re not just something on a piece of paper. They’re on our wall, but they’re not just on the wall. We live them. I hear people on our team stay them, you know, they’ll reference them, you know, regularly. So I know that they’re on the top of mind for them. We use it for hiring and hiring, promotion, recognition, to have everything to make sure that our value is alive and well. But the long game, they understand where we’re going and then, but more importantly, they understand why, and that’s important part of it. You know, we can set a goal for something, but if people don’t understand, aren’t bought into the why that’s our goal, or why are we going this direction, or why do we need our, you know, our revenue, to be this amount, then it’s harder for them to maybe buy into the mission. And I think what we’ve seen as organizations, and I’m sure the other chambers that are listening, we’re able to, we’re able to attract really high quality talent, because especially it seems like the workforce right now wants to be part of a mission that they’re excited about, and so we have an advantage a little bit. We may not always be able to compete in the marketplace for wages against some of our largest employers, but we’ve been able to attract people because they buy into the mission in the in the focus of the organization. And we have a we’re able to do this work because we have an incredible team of people. I just get out of their way, you know? They we get the right people and let them do their work and bring their expertise to the table, and it works out really well for our members and our organization and our community. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 33:10
it’s super important to be clear on that that mission and purpose, and that’s going to drive people in the right direction, for sure. Oh, Rick, I like asking everyone I have on the show about the future. How do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Rick Baker 33:29
Yeah, that’s, yeah, that’s the age old question, right? You know? And I think the ACC has done incredible work with the Horizon Report and updating that again now it’s incredible how accurate the last one was to project out where we are now 10 years later, and so that’s been a great resource. I think our business communities and in our every city around the country need us now more than ever. We should be a business imperative, and that’s our goal here in Grand Rapids, we need to be a business imperative for every business in town with a pace of change the challenges that are coming, the how quickly those challenges are coming, the disruption that we have. Our members need us tremendously to help stabilize the environment that they’re in, and a lot of the growth, the the excitement that happens in this country that we all love is happening at the local level. We’re driving it this. It’s not being top down, driven from, you know, from Washington, DC, it’s bottom up driven now, top can affect it and make our jobs harder, but we can, we can push through it, and we will help navigate. We’re a resilient, you know, people here in the United States, in our cities, and so that’s to me, I think. You know, now more than ever and into the future, we are, if we’re doing the right kind of work for our members, we’ll be a business imperative for them. Yeah. I
Brandon Burton 35:10
love that. I love how you said it’s your job to help stabilize the environment that these businesses are trying to conduct their business in. And that’s
Rick Baker 35:18
thrives. Business thrives unstable and predictable. The unstable, unpredictable is where it’s like, oh my gosh, what are we doing? And so we can bring some stability to them and help them see what’s coming and be prepared for it. Then we become very valuable to them.
Brandon Burton 35:36
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Rick, I wanted to give you a chance to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you and either learn more about the programs you talked about, or more about how you guys are conducting business there at the Grand Rapids chamber in general. What would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect with you?
Rick Baker 35:56
Yeah, the best way to reach me is I is email, quite honestly, and it’s, it’s simple emails, is rick@grandrapids.org, okay, very simple than that.
Brandon Burton 36:07
Yeah, I like that. We’ll, we’ll get it in our show notes too, to make it easy, even easier for people, yeah, to reach out to you. But Rick, this has been great having you on the show. I appreciate you taking the time to visit with us and to share. You know these, these programs you guys are involved with that are making an impact in your community, and I wish you and your team Best of luck as chamber of the year.
Rick Baker 36:28
Thank you so much. Brandon, appreciate you.
Brandon Burton 36:33
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