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Brandon Burton (00:00.93)
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. You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2026 ACCE Chamber of the Year finalist series. And today we’re joined by Wendy Gramza, president of the Toledo Regional Chamber of Commerce.
Wendy has served as president since July 2014, after more than a decade as the Chamber’s executive vice president. Throughout her career with the Chamber, she’s also led small business initiatives, including serving as vice president of small business and director of Small Business Development Center. Of the Small Business Development Center. She’s a graduate of the University of Toledo and holds both the IOM designation from the US Chamber of Commerce and the CCE designation from ACCE.
Wendy brings deep chamber leadership experience, strong community involvement, and passion for supporting business growth to today’s conversation. But Wendy, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. First of all, congratulations to you and your team for being selected as Chamber of the Year finalists. It’s a great accomplishment. But I would love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the chamber champions who are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.
Wendy Gramza (01:22.755)
Why interesting about myself. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. And yes, it is truly an honor. and I’m very grateful that we were selected as finalists. it is not just it may sound cliche, but there are so many thousands of great chambers across the country. and any one of them could be a finalist in you know in any year. We just have chambers that have such strong programming. So extremely grateful to be just representing
our industry this year as as one of the finalists for Chamber of the Year. Something interesting about me, I think our your audience, because it’s Chamber people, this will resonate with them. When you go into the Chamber World, you never are quite sure like where that’s going to take you, where you might find yourself. So I didn’t realize when I started my career in the Chamber that at one point I would be a regular at the Pentagon and because of some of the work that we were doing
doing and that would get to be a passenger in an F-16 fighter jet. And I’m gonna leave it at that. I wasn’t a really great wasn’t really a great passenger. You can probably understand what I’m talking about. I won’t go into any great detail. But that is just an opportunity that I never would have had if I weren’t part of the chamber industry and was very unexpected. If you would have told me that years ago that that’s that would happen, I would have said you’re crazy.
Brandon Burton (02:23.79)
Okay.
Brandon Burton (02:29.432)
That is pretty cool.
Brandon Burton (02:39.395)
Yeah.
Wendy Gramza (02:52.676)
So that was that was one of the highlights of of my career thus far.
Brandon Burton (02:53.208)
Yeah.
Brandon Burton (02:57.74)
Yeah, and that’s an experience you can’t pass up, no matter what the the short term side effects might be.
Wendy Gramza (03:01.431)
No, I tried. Actually I tried. I turned them down for many years and then finally our our base commander said, I’m taking you up myself. And I said, You’re gonna be sorry and he probably was. But it was it was a lot of fun.
Brandon Burton (03:05.378)
I don’t really.
Brandon Burton (03:18.114)
Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, tell us a little bit about the Toledo Regional Chamber to give us an idea of the size of the chamber, staff, budget, scope of work you’re involved with, just to kind of set the stage for our discussion today.
Wendy Gramza (03:31.3)
Sure, absolutely. So Toledo, if people don’t know, is in northwest Ohio, about 50 miles south of Detroit, but in Ohio, not in Michigan. we have just over 2,000 members. we’ve got an MSA that covers three counties. It’s a just over 600,000 people, so not a not a huge metro by a lot of of a lot of standards. we’ve got 25 staff people in a bunch
Budget around 3.6 million that fluctuates from from year to year given grants and some other things that we might be doing in any particular year, but usually between that three and a half and and four million dollar budget mark.
Brandon Burton (04:15.886)
Sure. Now are you guys involved with economic development or tourism or strictly chamber or what’s the Okay.
Wendy Gramza (04:21.315)
So we are strictly a chamber, officially, but of course we have very, very close relationships with our economic development agency that we actually helped start about 25 years ago. so even when when organizations are separate or not officially connected with the chamber, you can usually trace back to the chamber having some involvement in that organization being stood up or expanded or or something of that nature. we’re very work very closely with our convention and visitors.
Bureau, Downtown Association, and like many chambers do. So we work very closely with all of those organizations, but technically we’re all separate.
Brandon Burton (05:01.132)
Yeah. As you should, you know, work with all those other organizations closely, but it’s good to know your organization specifically just to help give context for our discussion today. So with this being a Chamber of the Year finalist episode, I like spending most of our time and our conversation today around the programs that were submitted on your Chamber of the Year application. So we’ll take a quick break and when we get back, we’ll dive into those programs and learn all about those.
Wendy Gramza (05:05.069)
Yeah.
Wendy Gramza (05:09.6)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Wendy Gramza (05:29.027)
Sounds good.
Brandon Burton (05:31.146)
All right, Wendy, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’re gonna dive into the the programs that you submitted on your Chamber of the Year application. if if you’d like to introduce what the the first program is that you’d like to address, we can cover that and and tell us about the origins and how it’s evolved and and what it’s become, the impact it’s making.
Wendy Gramza (05:52.73)
Sure, absolutely. So it’s always hard to just pick two, right? but that’s what they make us do. So that’s what we do. So one of the ones that we picked was what we call our benefits bridge. and that is really our our way, our our solution, if you will, to a talent problem that became very evident to us as we worked very closely with our businesses who were ha it’s it’s softened a little bit in the last two years, but
Brandon Burton (05:58.435)
That’s right.
Wendy Gramza (06:22.763)
even prior to COVID and then directly after COVID, really having trouble finding finding staff people. And then even when they found staff people, we’d hear a lot about they don’t want to be promoted, they don’t want overtime. and you know a lot of people made some made some wrong you know could came to some wrong conclusions about why that was, right? people just don’t want to work, blah blah blah. We really started to dig in. And what we found was this
Benefits cliff that we were starting to hear about is real. And it’s a system that we created to help people, and it now really is holding people back. And so we felt that if we were we created the system, we should be able to fix the system, right? And we started doing that, you know, in our community, in our state, and then we’re hoping that that that really is something that spreads across the country with the help of one of our U.S. senators, Jon Husted. So again,
People will immediately after they’ll get a raise, they immediately lose all their benefits before they even see that increased paycheck. And it really just becomes a math problem for people, right? So if I work another day and I make another $300, but I lose $3,000 in benefits, guess what? I’m not going to do that, right? I can’t afford to do that. So we put some funding in place by working with our county. And you can imagine when we came to our county.
And said, hey, we want to help people get back into the workforce by extending their benefits. They were like, wait, who are you? You can’t be the Chamber of Commerce saying these things to us, right? We’re like, no, no, no, we are really, because it’s keeping people from the workforce, and that’s affecting our members. So they agreed to put in some money, and then the state found out about it, and they agreed to put in some money without us asking, when does that ever happen? And so we have some money for a pilot program. we had
Brandon Burton (08:08.045)
Yeah.
Wendy Gramza (08:22.359)
We have about 60 people now in the program. That changes on a regular basis, so it could be higher than that. We’re only a year and a half in. A hundred, over a hundred have asked about the program, but only 50 qualified for it. The other 50, we were able to not just say, hey, sorry, you don’t qualify for this program. We were able to connect them to other resources in the community that they did qualify for. And one of the reasons that we think we’ve been successful in getting people to reach out and apply.
Is because we’re working through the businesses. So the businesses they know who those people are who don’t accept promotions, who don’t take overtime. So they were able to reach out to them and say, hey, this program might be for you. I think that’s really the difference maker for us, is that we’re we’re working with businesses to identify who those folks are. And so we’ve got about 60 people that are in the program. And what we do is smooth out or create that bridge. So provide some funding to them.
So they can take that promotion, they can work that overtime, and there’s a pathway to reducing their benefits that comes with some coaching so they can see their way out of it. Like what does that look like at the end of this time period? I’ll be bringing in enough money that I won’t need those benefits. Right? So they understand and they have somebody that coaches them and helps them figure that out, right?
Brandon Burton (09:48.013)
Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. Aside from the the the the money aspect of it, there’s a comfort zone that comes, right? When you’re in a place of employment and you’ve got your benefits, you get used to the pay.
what else can you do to help them create a vision of a greater future? And I think that goes to what you’re talking about now with connecting them with some coaching and whatnot. But talk just a little bit more about that, about helping them create that vision of a a better future for themselves.
Wendy Gramza (10:10.15)
yeah. Yeah.
Wendy Gramza (10:18.745)
Well, and you know, we have great resources in our community. So it was just about pulling in those resources that we’d already been working very closely with with some other programs that we were doing, our industry sector partnership, which that could have been one of our programs, but we had to pick two. but we had already built a relationship with all of those social service agencies, and so it was really easy to pull them in and say, Hey, you help people with financial literacy. We want you to be part of this program and you help people
with homelessness and we want you to you know to be part of this program. So we have a whole cadre of services that we make available to those individuals. And we and again like any good chamber program, right? You can’t create everything on our own. We can’t also all of a sudden become experts at that. We pulled in the experts in our community who already have been doing that around our community. So that’s really again the strength of it is not trying to do everything on your own but trying to pull the
those resources in. So people might say, well you didn’t bring anything new to the table. We did because if people don’t know about resources or if they don’t feel comfortable reaching out, they might as well not exist for that person. So we feel good about putting that in front of them and and making them feel like yes this is for me. I can I can make this call and I I’m going to get this assistance.
Brandon Burton (11:29.496)
Right. Yeah, exactly.
Brandon Burton (11:41.217)
Yeah. So with a program like this, you had mentioned that about half of the applicants didn’t qualify for the program. What kind of qualifications are there? What kind of things do they need to to be able to I I assume it has to do with certain type of employment or maybe certain industries or things like that. What what are the the qualifications for somebody to get into this program?
Wendy Gramza (12:01.783)
Yeah, it mainly had to do with you know what their what their salary was, what their household income was. It it was it’s really fine financially based. ’cause some people might, you know, might have thought and again, they didn’t even have the benefits that we were talking about. So it just, you know, again, people that just kinda weren’t weren’t really a match for the program. So I can’t I I don’t have the specifics that, but yeah, there’s there’s a formula kind of
Brandon Burton (12:25.048)
Yeah.
Sure. Sure.
Wendy Gramza (12:31.707)
based on their income, their household income, some of those sorts of things that they, you know, they may not have qualified for. Because maybe they you know they weren’t gonna lose more in benefits that they were earning. They might have lost some benefits, but right. So it was really around like people who had, you know, childcare, which is a really, really costly if you lose that benefit. So you know for people maybe didn’t have that, the numbers didn’t didn’t didn’t really pencil out that they would they would really
benefit from the program. But like I said, we were able to help them get other resources to help themselves.
Brandon Burton (13:03.416)
That makes sense.
Brandon Burton (13:07.404)
Yeah. So you said there’s about sixty people in the program right now. What is the what is the length of the program look like? So aside from the financial aspect of it, you pr you’re providing the coaching and this mentorship. Is it over a period of several months, a year? What what’s the length of the program look like?
Wendy Gramza (13:11.587)
Mm. At least sixty.
Wendy Gramza (13:26.113)
Yeah, so of course everything like right when you know we want to make sure that the funding’s sustainable so pilot programs are are a little bit difficult. so we’ve been we’ve it’s a two-year program, so we’ve got like two years to get people through that before we can, you know, after that, if the program’s not renewed or it’s not made statewide, then you know, we might not be able to so we want to get those people in early and give them that that two-year cycle. For some, again, based on their situation, it might be a
a shorter time frame where they they won’t need they won’t need that assistance. So the course is steeper for some people than for for others.
Brandon Burton (14:02.026)
Okay. is this being funded through
Yeah. is this being funded through a foundation or through the chamber directly?
Wendy Gramza (14:13.269)
Actually it’s being funded through our county and our state. So the chamber, other than our expertise in marketing the program, that yeah, that funding’s coming from public sources.
Brandon Burton (14:18.295)
Okay.
You’re putting everything together. Yeah.
Brandon Burton (14:26.914)
Perfect. Very good. Anything else that we need to know about the benefits bridge before we move on to the next slide?
Wendy Gramza (14:33.509)
I don’t think so other than again it’s getting statewide and it’s getting some national attention. So our US Senator is looking at providing some federal funding for the program and piloting in a in a couple of states, which we of course would assume that Ohio will be one of them since that’s the the state that he covers and that we’ve we’ve we’ve shown some good good progress with the program. So we’ve got that recipe.
Brandon Burton (14:59.17)
Yeah. Well I see I see this being a program that can change lives when it gets them, you know, over that hurdle of that fear of getting out of the comfort zone and opening up a new world of possibilities for these employees. So yeah, it is.
Wendy Gramza (15:13.877)
Absolutely. And it’s generational too. So I mean that’s that’s what really is important to us.
Brandon Burton (15:21.152)
Yeah. Well let’s let’s shift into your other program, which I know is around talent and workforce as well. You guys are are focused on talent and workforce, which is awesome as any chamber should be. But tell us what the your other program is all about.
Wendy Gramza (15:36.344)
Yeah, so again, just stemming from you know asking any business member from sixteen forward, and I think we were hearing it a lot more than some of our traditional economic development agencies that you know they brought in a big company and they would be able to find the workers that they needed because they might have you know be at a different pay scale. Since we represent a lot of small and medium, specifically manufacturers, we were hearing very early on
From them, hey, we understand how the system works, right? We bring somebody in with no skills, we teach them the skills, we pay them what we can, and then once they gain those skills, they’ll leave us and go to a bigger company, and we’ll go back and grab somebody that doesn’t, you know, have have you know skills and you know and so on and so forth. Right. We start over again, we know we can’t compete with the bigger companies, and we feel you know, that we feel good about that, right? We’ve taken somebody that didn’t have any skills, gave them some skills, and now they’re able to work for, you know, a GM or you know
Brandon Burton (16:23.64)
Start over again. Yeah.
Wendy Gramza (16:36.187)
A larger versol or a larger company. Well, they started seeing early on in you know 25 or 15 and 16, there’s nobody, there’s nobody at the other end of that pipeline for us to train. So that’s why we really started thinking about this tight labor pool, tight labor market, how we could help, you know, pe train people, you know, what what what was holding people back? where were the positions, you know, because we heard anecdotally.
can’t find a welder to save your life. And then we’d hear, you know, you can’t find a nurse to save your life. Okay, well that’s those things are probably all are true.
Brandon Burton (17:13.804)
I hope you can find a nurse to save your life. Right. Yeah.
Wendy Gramza (17:15.857)
Well well yeah, sorry, pun intended, I guess. but so we really started to look at okay, like do we not have enough nurses? Do like what we can’t just take this anecdotally. So we put together a program where we used some other organizations, Kale, which is the Center for Adult and Experimental Learning, and I can’t remember the name of the other organization, forgive me, and said we really need to know what’s going on in our labor market ’cause it’s different.
Here. It’s different everywhere, right? We’re we’re you know, still a lot of blue-collar workers, so you know, a lot of manufacturing, a lot of skilled and unskilled, so a little bit different here. So, what’s really going on? So, we use data, a whole lot of data. We involved a whole lot of partners, a lot of our members to figure out what’s the current state of our labor market. And we actually just redid that post-COVID because the initial study was pre-COVID, and then everything got worse.
Brandon Burton (17:48.738)
Yeah.
Wendy Gramza (18:15.637)
And then got better. so we just just recently sort of updated those numbers. But that that study turned into a strategy, and I think that was the real difference. It wasn’t just like, hey guys, here’s the information. It was no like, okay, let’s first of all let’s gut check this. Went back to our members and said, Here’s what the data says, is this is this what you’re seeing? And we could have good discussions about why or why not. that’s when we really leaned into some
non-traditional sources of finding employees leaned in heavy to veterans, leaned in heavy to returning citizens. We have a whole program about that that we could have we could have talked about. But all of those things were born out of this talent alignment strategy. And it wasn’t a strategy just for the chamber. We created a macro coalition where we pulled in all of our partners and said, okay, here’s the data. Let’s sit down together and figure this out.
You know, the nursing was a good situation where we looked at or a good example of a situation where we looked at how many nurses we were graduating in our programs, and it was more than what our need was. So supply was outpacing demand, yet we knew that’s not what was happening. So what is happening? Well, the nurses are getting trained, but they’re leaving. They’re going to be a traveling nurse or they’re they’re going somewhere else. So then you can dig in, and that’s when then we pull in our industry.
Industry sector partnership that we have in healthcare and say, all right, guys, we may or may not have a salary issue here, right? Because we’re graduating more than we need. And so that’s just kind of a glimpse into these really deep specific conversations that we would have with our industries about, you know, help us help you, right? Like we really need to dig in and find out the why. And if we fix that why, we fix it for everybody. Everybody’s okay with competing, but nobody wins when there’s nobody to compete.
Brandon Burton (19:51.459)
Right.
Brandon Burton (20:08.43)
Yeah.
Wendy Gramza (20:15.163)
compete for. And that’s really been our our strategy and our our mantra about let’s create a talent pipeline and then people can compete. But everybody loses if there’s nobody in the pipeline.
Brandon Burton (20:28.056)
Yeah. So I like how you you take the data and then it’s like, okay, what do we do with this now, right? You create the strategy and it’s leading to these discussions, like you mentioned the example with nursing where, you know, maybe there’s a a salary discrepancy here.
What what comes out of those discussions on the back end? So as you have the data, you’re implementing a plan, you’re having the the tough conversations with the different industry sectors. I imagine that even though there’s data and evidence that there’s probably still gonna be some pushback, there’s gonna be some
Wendy Gramza (21:02.403)
Yeah, and the sal the salary one what like is well that’s a great one to point out because it was very easy to see what the problem might be. A little harder to get everybody on board to necessarily like fix that, right? What’s what’s the fix? but at least now they know what the issue might be. They know that we you know, we’re not gonna go out and train more nurses like we might have done had we not looked at the data and really been honest with no, we don’t need to train more nurses. We need to keep them.
Brandon Burton (21:16.513)
Yeah.
Brandon Burton (21:32.216)
Yeah.
Wendy Gramza (21:32.42)
And so then, you know, a lot around you know talent attraction and retention, a lot about talking to people about our quality of life and cost of living, because you know, a dollar earned here is different than a dollar earned, you know, in Chicago. So how do we really start to tell that story? So that was something that the community could do. you know, and when it comes to the manufacturers, we realized too that a lot of people were thinking that manufacturers
Manufacturing is it’s dirty and it’s dangerous and it’s not. So that turned into a campaign of promoting manufacturing as a career in the school systems, both to the students, the guidance counselors, the teachers, and the parents. And so we’ve we’ve, you know, a whole bunch of programs and things have been created to get people more interested in going into manufacturing. We created some of them, some of them were created by our partners.
Brandon Burton (22:27.757)
Yeah.
Brandon Burton (22:31.65)
Yeah. I would love to know the level of psychology. I’m sure there’s a study that’s been done somewhere to look at, you know, graduating high school students or graduating college students that feel like they need to leave the community that they grew up in to find a career because the grass is always greener somewhere else when there’s a lot of opportunity where you’re from.
Wendy Gramza (22:48.141)
And
Right, and you’re always dealing with that, right? Like every community deals with that. It’s just like a trade imbalance, right? You know you’re gonna lose people ’cause they wanna go and see other places, so you also have to have an importing strategy as well. And so that’s led to a lot of work that the chamber’s been doing in in attracting and retaining talent. And that’s that’s a whole nother conversation that we could have.
Brandon Burton (22:53.634)
Young one.
Brandon Burton (23:12.8)
Right, absolutely.
Wendy Gramza (23:13.635)
But that’s how it just it’s all it all fits together. And I’ll tell you, we’re looking right now at the labor market is softening. How much and for how long? And what does that mean for our programming? Is it still relevant? Do we need to change things up? Do we need to add, you know, different things? we were just just talking to somebody, and this was actually in a in another state, they applied for a job and were told there were 12,000 other applicants. So just that quickly, I I think we’ve seen we’ve seen that labor market softening.
In certain areas. We’re still not seeing that a whole lot here when it comes to manufacturing. There’s there’s still a shortage, but it has softened. you can find a welder, right? It might take you a couple of months, but they’re out there. So we just need to make sure that we’re reacting to the needs of our business community. You know, is this a blip? Will it go back? You know, we’re just we’re really trying to get our arms around what the future looks like. So we make sure that we’re we’re poised to meet to meet the next.
Brandon Burton (23:44.909)
Yeah.
Brandon Burton (23:56.834)
Yeah.
Wendy Gramza (24:13.475)
challenge that businesses are having. It’s not always going to be labor.
Brandon Burton (24:15.764)
Right. Well, and and to your point with the market softening, the labor market softening, I wonder how much of that is the the influx of AI and you get a lot of slop online and when that many people can you just throw out resumes or apply or have bots do it for them or whatever, you get a lot of slop out there. So filtering through all that and figuring out the best way to process process everything to find those good candidates is gonna be a whole nother skill set.
Wendy Gramza (24:36.195)
Right.
Wendy Gramza (24:40.921)
Right, right.
The other thing we found out too that that was kind of interesting in the healthcare field, that the as as things softened a little bit, they would still keep the job openings posted. And you know, we’d call and be like, Okay, you and well no, we’re those jobs really aren’t available. Well then why are they so we’re like this is the data that we rely on to tell us what the labor market’s doing and you’re skewing it by posting positions you’re not really hiring for. So that’s been some interesting conversations with some of our our memories
Brandon Burton (25:00.973)
Yeah.
Wendy Gramza (25:12.507)
numbers as well.
Brandon Burton (25:13.75)
Yeah. And you know, my wife just went through this about eight months ago and that very thing. She’d apply for a position and no, sorry, it’s already been taken. Well, why is it still up here, you know?
Wendy Gramza (25:24.321)
Why is it still posted? Yep, exactly. Yep. Yep.
Brandon Burton (25:25.4)
But yeah, so that’s frustrating. But I’ll I’ll tell you what was super helpful was those who did job postings and said we’re taking applications up until this date and then we’re gonna assess and make our decision by this date, you know, of who we’re gonna interview and move forward with. And that helped give a lot of clarity to job applicants to be able to figure out where they want to apply and where they wanna put their attention.
Brandon Burton (25:53.465)
So as we as we start to wrap things up, Wendy, I wanted to ask you on behalf of those listening who are interested in taking 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?
Wendy Gramza (26:10.925)
think one thing that our industry has done so well and I have to give a shout out to ACCE because any chamber that’s not a member of ACCE make the investment do it. you know it is if you’re a smaller chamber you don’t pay as much as the larger chambers do. So and they work really hard to make sure that things are relevant to chambers in all sizes. So that would be the first thing that you need to do ’cause you get so much out of that. And then really if you are a member and you’re not paying close attention to that horizons.
Initiative that was so compelling when it came out the first time, and now they’ve done they’ve done a second generation of it, if you will. That should really spark your thinking. You’re gonna go, yes, I agree, I’m seeing this. and it gives you some some practical things to think about. It’s not going to give you the answer because the answer is different if you’re in Miami versus Toledo or Tulsa or wherever. but you know, lean into lean into the association, lean into other
chambers who are willing to help and lean into that horizons because it’s really going to help you frame really you know what it is that chambers should be doing and you know get get a lot of sleep and drink a lot of liquids because what we’re doing is not it’s not easy it’s not tangible you know I still have I was actually just talking to a friend of mine and she’s like I don’t mean to appear stupid but I don’t really really understand what you do and a lot of people don’t right and
Brandon Burton (27:25.73)
Yeah.
Wendy Gramza (27:40.652)
And we know all the reasons why that is, because we don’t sell pencils, right? Or pen’s the pen, I guess. You know, here, buy this, here’s how much it costs, here’s what it’ll do. That’s not what we’re selling. we’re selling solutions, right? And we’re selling success, and that’s harder for people to grasp. So it’s not it’s not in it’s not an easy endeavor, but it’s one that’s needed in every community. So keep the faith.
Brandon Burton (27:40.962)
Yeah.
Brandon Burton (28:04.664)
Yeah. Absolutely. well I like asking everyone I have on the show about the future of Chambers. I know you just mentioned the Horizons Initiative as well, but as we look to the future of Chambers, how do you see the future of Chambers and their purpose going forward?
Wendy Gramza (28:20.288)
you know, it’s
It’s always changing. and boy if I had the answer to that, you know, I wouldn’t have to work anymore.
But it is a little bit of reading the tea leaves. And so you have to look at those things that are signals of what’s happening. and you and even if you can’t recognize it before it happens, you’ve got to be ready to like pivot. And I think that’s what chambers are really good at and I think that’s what’s going to keep us relevant. you know, we’re we’re a machine with a with a with a recipe, with hopefully no in our case, we’ve got some money in the bank, so we’re not
You know, when something happens in our community, we’re not like, gosh, we’re you know, we can we’re sustainable, we’re gonna be here in five or ten years. And I think the most important thing is really getting your community to recognize that and to lean into that and to be ready to partner with unusual partners. Like, you know, we’ve partnered with you know the health department even before COVID. We were partnering with the health department when we had some water issues in our community, you know, partnering with you know, our
county commissioners that a lot of times you know we didn’t see eye to eye with just thinking about those sort of unholy alliances that are really going to be important if chambers are going to stay relevant. And they can work. You can agree to, you know, we still disagree with our county commissioners, you know, when they want to spend money or they want to increase taxes, but we agree with them on the benefits cliff and that we’re working together to fix it. So we agree on that and we disagree on the things we disagree on.
Brandon Burton (29:46.114)
Yeah.
Brandon Burton (30:00.687)
Wendy Gramza (30:03.125)
So I think we can’t to be successful, you can’t lose sight and just completely say, now I’m I’m working with this group, so I’m gonna say yes to everything they do. No, you’ve still got to be able to pull back and go, no, you know what, that might be in the best interest of business, but this is not. and I think it’s really important if we’re going to be be relevant that we, you know, just to summarize, we are willing to have entertain partnerships with groups that normally historically we would not, but that we still understand.
Brandon Burton (30:17.752)
Yeah.
Wendy Gramza (30:33.115)
that sometimes we’ve got to stay true to representing businesses because it’s really easy to let a lot of these social issues pull us off task.
Brandon Burton (30:41.838)
Yeah. I think that’s such a great point that you’d made. So first of all being a problem solver, but also not letting those those I’ll say minor disagreements create a barrier to being able to find agreement and synergies in the future. So that’s a a great example.
well Wendy, I’m gonna give you a chance to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and learn more about how you guys are doing things there in Toledo or about these programs you discussed today. Where would you point them and what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect?
Wendy Gramza (31:12.781)
Well, and you know, like I said, ACCE is a great way to connect the conferences and I swear they’re not paying me for this. or you, right? the conference is coming up, that’s in New Orleans. Who doesn’t want to be in New Orleans in July, right? It’s gonna be, you know, balmy. my husband’s going and still claims he’s gonna golf while I’m in the session, so I think he’s crazy, but how that works out. But again, I’ll be at the conference in a couple of weeks. and then you can certainly reach me by email.
Brandon Burton (31:27.512)
Yeah.
Brandon Burton (31:34.054)
Good for him. More power to him.
Wendy Gramza (31:42.725)
It’s wendy.gramza@toledochamber.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn.
Brandon Burton (31:52.216)
Very good. We’ll get that in our show notes for this episode and make it easy to connect. But I’ve thank you for spending time with us today and highlighting these programs that are making a great impact there in the Toledo region. And I wish you and your team best of luck as Chamber of the Year.
Wendy Gramza (31:57.475)
Great.
Wendy Gramza (32:09.764)
Great, thank you so much. Appreciate it.
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