Below is an auto-generated transcription. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.
Feel free to join our Chamber Chat Champions Facebook Group to discuss this episode and to share your own experiences and tips with other Chamber Champions.
Brandon Burton (00:00.974)
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. Joining us today is a truly impactful leader and community champion, Janet Tressler Davis, President and CEO of the Westerville Area Chamber of Commerce.
With a sharp strategic mind and deep commitment to local business, Janet has guided the chamber to national recognition, making it a vital force for entrepreneurship and economic growth. Janet holds the distinction of being a certified chamber executive and is a graduate of the US Chambers IOM program at Notre Dame. Her leadership has earned the chamber multiple honors, including the Torch Award for Ethics, Chamber of the Year, and Business of the Year.
while she’s personally been recognized with awards like Chamber Executive Director of the Year and Otterbein Alumni Community Service Award. A lifetime resident, or a lifelong resident of Westerville, Janet’s commitment to civil service is rooted in a family legacy of public leadership. Beyond her role at the chamber, she spent over three decades as a group fitness instructor.
bringing the same energy and passion to the studio as she does to her professional life. Janet, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.
Janet Tressler Davis (01:44.554)
Thank you, Brandon. Thank you for asking me to be part of the program too. Hello, chamber peers. It’s always good to interact with each other. So I hope you enjoy this, conversation today. Something interesting, Brandon already kind of mentioned it, but was a lifetime resident of the community that I serve in. So I know sometimes people make us as a profession and they move from community to community or state to state for chambers. And I’ve been blessed, I feel, to be able to be right in my home.
community to do this and watch the community grow as well as our chamber has grown. So I’ve loved every aspect of it.
Brandon Burton (02:20.556)
Yeah, so the question that I had is the group fitness instructor. You must have started when you were five doing the group fitness instructions, right? Trying to figure out how that math works. So that’s great.
Janet Tressler Davis (02:26.856)
hahaha
haha
Yeah, it’s been a long time. Even before I got married, I was teaching group fitness. So I danced all my life. then afterwards, I didn’t dance in college, but decided I wanted to stay active. And so I’ve worked for a couple of different locations and just evening classes or weekend classes is what I do.
Brandon Burton (02:52.502)
Yeah, very good. Well, tell us a little bit about the Westerville area chamber just to kind of set the stage for a conversation. I think it’d be helpful to know the size of the chamber, the staff, budget, the scope of work you guys are involved with just so we can all kind of relate where you’re coming from as we get into our discussion today.
Janet Tressler Davis (03:11.145)
Sure. So our Chamber of Commerce, when I started there 33 years ago, our chamber was about 250 members and we were in a small office of about 700 square feet and it was myself and one other person and she worked part-time. And then we moved different offices, in fact, three different times and finally found our destination and we built a building about 20 years ago and that is a 3,010 square foot building.
So we didn’t fill it at the time, but now today we do. So we’re very fortunate. We knew we’d grow into it eventually, so we just had tenants for probably a good 14 years. Currently our chamber’s about 817 members, and that represents a little over 17,000 employees. And our footprint is our school district. Our city of Westerville currently is a population of 40,000, but our school district’s about 100,000.
So that’s the foot pit recover. And so oftentimes, we do projects and work with the city, but they usually have a lens that stays within their city limits. So sometimes ours is a little bit broader than that. our Audubon University is in our community. That’s where I graduated from, but it’s a liberal arts university. And then we have a fantastic library, the third busiest library in state of Ohio. So lots of people use it. And their footprint is our school district as well.
And then of course our school district, have 23 schools and three of those are high schools. We have a city manager form of government, which is a little bit unique. Lots of times people will have a mayor type of government in their municipalities. And I think city manager form of government is nice because the leader of the city is not worrying about their next destination, like when they’re gonna have to run a campaign. So they’re elected by seven member city council.
which that is elected by the citizens of Westerville.
Brandon Burton (05:08.686)
Very good. Now as far as the work that you guys are involved with, are you guys strictly chambered? Do you have any of the tourism, economic development, any of that sort of responsibility?
Janet Tressler Davis (05:21.026)
No, we don’t. did start the Visitors Bureau before I started at the Chamber, but they spun that off and it’s its own C3. We were housed with the Visitors and Convention Bureau until we moved to our new office building about 20, it’s actually been 24 years ago that we actually built our building. We do have a Leadership Westerbill program that we started and then we spun it off on its own and hired an executive director and they have their own board.
And then we took that back about six years ago. And so still same kind of program, but we manage it within our office, but they still are their own 501C3 and they still have their own board.
Brandon Burton (06:01.932)
Okay, that’s very good. How many staff do you guys have? Okay, very good. How many staff do you guys have there in your chamber?
Janet Tressler Davis (06:04.079)
And then economic development is done by our city of Westerville. So, yeah. sorry. Yeah. I did miss that. Sorry. We have six staff members and that just grew this year. We just hired a membership growth person and spent, she does membership growth and special projects. And four of the positions are full-time positions. One is a 35 hour position and one’s a 25 hour position to make up the total of six.
Brandon Burton (06:33.72)
Very good. Well, that helps to have an understanding of the resources and the landscape that you’re coming from as we get into our topic today. So today we’ll be spending most of our time talking about business advocacy councils and we’ll dive into that in those details as soon as we get back from this quick break.
All right, Janet, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, today we’re talking about business advocacy councils. So I understand that you guys have set up some business advocacy councils.
It might be good before we get too deep into the weeds. know listeners of the podcast, some are brand new to the industry. Some have been in it for 30 years or more. But just on a high level, tell us what a business advocacy council is and how you guys went about creating them and the value of them and so on and so forth.
Janet Tressler Davis (07:28.551)
Absolutely. My first thought about a business advocacy or we used to call it government relations when we first started it is that we represent businesses and if we’re not looking at the business voice and looking out for the businesses in our community, who is? So we believe we should be. So shortly after I started, we created a government relations committee and we never started taking position on candidates, but we did review and still do issues and we’ll take position on state.
and local issues. And I think important thing to do is if you get in that space is to make sure when you decide if you’re going to take positions is what’s the business reason for doing it. Because sometimes a school levy, know, people feel passionate about it because their children are in school and certainly we always have to pass those levies. While that may be important, but what is the real business reason? Because we’re a business organization. So again, if we are in support of anything, that’s the lens that we look at it from.
is how it’s going to impact business. Or whether it’s an income tax or a library levy or fire levy, whatever it might be.
Brandon Burton (08:34.444)
Yeah, so as you guys kind of dove into this realm of creating these business advocacy councils, what were some of those first maybe higher level items that you guys noticed that we need to kind of wrap our minds around this and get some other strong minds around this to create this advocacy council?
Janet Tressler Davis (08:54.81)
Yeah, we had our school at the time at Ohio school funding is a little bit unique. I’m not sure if every state’s that way, but a lot of it depends on property tax and we get some portion from the state of Ohio, but we also have to make up the difference at the property taxes. And you can have bond levies, which are for your buildings and then operating levies, which is for everything else to operate. And oftentimes our levies were for two or three years.
and then they’d be back on the ballot. And back then they were on the ballot like every other year. And it was just getting fatigued in our community. And so we really dove in to understand how they’re using their money, why it seems like we don’t want to keep throwing money at a problem if there is a problem, but how we really rank among other school districts of our size at that time. And it really helped that we had a committee of passionate people that wanted to do that.
When you say like, how do you recruit people to be part of the committee? When we have a new member orientation, you we list all of our committees, we have 11 committees, we have 42 events a year. So there’s lots of ways that people can engage. But as soon as you start talking about advocacy work and government relations, either people’s eyes glaze over and think, I am not interested in getting in that, or people are like really interested. So it’s pretty easy to find those people that are really passionate about it.
Brandon Burton (10:16.632)
Yeah.
Janet Tressler Davis (10:18.092)
And we’ve just been fortunate to have a committee of anywhere from about 10 to 20 people that will participate. this is one of our two committees of the whole chamber that meet every month. So we often bring speakers in nowadays and we might bring someone in about the unemployment compensation system, or we might bring someone in from the Ohio chamber. We always bring in a lobbyist from the Ohio chamber at least once a year to talk about state issues or if it was the state budget.
you know, what’s going to get traction from those issues that passed in the state budget. And then workers compensation while people speak about that. And then we also at the local level, we’ll look at like our planning department, our zoning department, because sometimes we get calls from members that they’re trying to open their unit next door. They’re open, but they’re trying to open the one next door that they bought. And they have to wait and wait for inspections. And then all of a sudden they have someone come.
and they miss their low voltage inspections. So now they go to the bottom of the list to come back and get inspected. Well, the whole time, this business is paying rent. They probably hired the additional staff. They might have inventory in there. And so we try to serve as like a go-between or a liaison just to call the department and find out, there anything we can do to push this through? Because we are certainly wanting to look out for our businesses and make sure that they can be as prosperous as they can as soon as they can. And I’m sure our city wants that too.
but they have policies and strict procedures, so we sometimes will intercede if we can. And that’s how we got involved with working directly with city issues, even though those are not ballot issues, it’s more just making it a business-friendly environment.
Brandon Burton (11:57.26)
Yeah, which is just as important. So my question was going to be around recruitment. So you address that where you see the eyes glazing over and you can kind of separate those from the ones that are engaging. But do you extend invitations? Do you just ask people to show up? Is there an application to it? What does the process look like to formalizing a council?
Janet Tressler Davis (12:20.729)
Yeah, we don’t have applications for our committees. We do find out if people are interested and if they either they could fill out a form at the new member orientation or not everybody attends member orientation. So we certainly send it out when they join. And if they indicate interest, we invite them to come to a meeting or any of our committees. They can just come and check it out and see if it’s something that they’d like to serve on. And then a lot of committees will have different roles and we have.
we break out into three different areas within our council. And those areas that we track, we determine those based on a survey that we send our members every year. And we always ask one question that is always the same is, what’s preventing your business from advancing? And what are those issues? Is it state or local? And if it’s state, we list some issues. If it’s local, we list some areas. And then people can tell us that. And from there, that’s what we track. So at the state level and local level, know
state level, it’s been healthcare, workforce, and taxation. At a local level this year, it’s business regulations, workforce, and taxation. And so the workforce, we dive deeper into that and find out it’s more about talent development rather than talent attraction. So we could talk about that. We have a big space in the workforce arena that we’ve been focusing on for the last four years.
Brandon Burton (13:44.278)
Yeah, no, that’s great. So at any given time, how many of these different advocacy committees would you have operating or being actively engaged at any given time?
Janet Tressler Davis (13:58.43)
Well, the Maine Advocacy Council, so everybody we meet the first Tuesday of every month and those smaller groups, they get together when there’s an issue. So if the state is having an issue come up about taxation, they would meet offline from another meeting and then they report at the main meeting. Or they go to city council and listen to city council. We have a few people that will do that to find out what issues are coming up at city council. So it’s all just they do it on the off weeks.
Brandon Burton (14:16.352)
Okay.
Janet Tressler Davis (14:27.723)
of when we’re not meeting.
Brandon Burton (14:29.206)
Okay, that makes lot of sense. So I know chambers are all about tracking data, tracking information. So you wouldn’t keep doing this if it wasn’t helpful, if it wasn’t providing value. So maybe we can kind of shift the focus to the value of these councils and these business advocacy councils and really look at where is the needle moved as you guys have had this intense focus on these different issues that have popped up.
Can you share some of those wins or where you’ve seen the environment shift in your direction?
Janet Tressler Davis (15:06.721)
Yeah, good or bad, when people do come to us, if there’s a ballot issue, when your community, if your school board or your city council, if they come to you, the people that are running the campaign and want your endorsement, I think that says something because they know it represents the business community. So we’re fortunate that people do ask for that. Sometimes right now we’re in the middle of a school levy issue right now and it’s a difficult one. And, you know, we really hate to not support it.
But you also, if you stay neutral most of the time, they think you’re not supporting it, know, so they really want you to support it for sure. we have to find those, again, those business reasons why to do that. So the win for that though, to me is that they find value in businesses. They wanna know what the businesses think and they want their support. The next area of value is that our Hope Bar members are feeling like they’re in the know, either because they can come to meetings.
or we do put the minutes out from the meeting on our website. And then we also have a legislative link that will put out, I guess, a section of our newsletter that goes out once a month if there’s a particular ballot issue or even a state issue that’s not even on the ballot, but it’s just something that legislators are talking about that we want our members to know or maybe write a letter campaign. And we try to encourage our members to write letters on supporting a certain aspect of a piece of legislation.
We also bring our state reps and our senators in once a year. And I just randomly, I probably have to invite 40 members and then we try to get 20 in a room. And we let that be the conversation. It’s not for the legislators to be telling us things, it’s letting them hear from their constituents. Like how is certain legislation impacting them at their work? Or have you ever thought about deadlines? This one lady brought up one time, you’ve got this deadline for me to fill out this form and
X and X date and you turn around and have to have, we have to have another report done two months later and it’s just duplicating information. We’ll hear about six months later, they came back and they consolidated them. So that was kind of a nice win for that lady. I know she felt really that they listened to her, which was good. So we call those, legislative forums and we just bring the legislators in. We also bring our legislators in at the federal level for all our members at a luncheon.
Brandon Burton (17:13.195)
Yeah.
Janet Tressler Davis (17:27.702)
So we do that once a year. So we do our congressional reps. But for the smaller level, you know, we bring in our state reps. And I think that’s a compliment when members can bring their state reps in and they come and they want to participate. So that’s been a good thing. We also invite our local, like city council chair and school board president when we bring the legislators in.
Brandon Burton (17:52.674)
That’s good. It’s good for them just to hear the discussions that are going on and what is important to business owners, business leaders. You know, how can we create a more business friendly environment in our communities? And that’s the end goal. And, and as a chamber being able to convene those leaders and those thought leaders to come together in the same room and drive that conversation that hopefully is looking and finding answers. So you’re not filling out redundant forms.
Janet Tressler Davis (18:04.832)
Right.
Brandon Burton (18:22.708)
over and over and some of the more serious things that really do affect and hinder business. So it sounds like there’s been some good wins for sure as you guys have convened these business and advocacy councils.
Janet Tressler Davis (18:34.795)
Yeah, and definitely open the lines of communication too, you know, because for the legislators, you know, they’re hearing from different businesses and they can follow up with them and or say, hey, you know, come down and have a tour with us, bring your whole staff or, you know, bring your management team or things. And on the reverse side, I think our businesses then feel that connection where they can call. They might not get the legislature, but at least they’ll get their aid. So having, keeping those lines of communication open is really great.
Brandon Burton (19:01.022)
Absolutely. Well, and you mentioned when they reach out to you and talk about, can you endorse this, you know, whether it’s a candidate or an initiative or something that’s on a ballot, it means that they see that you have some some influence in in the outcomes of these elections. So that does speak volumes to the work that you guys are doing. So that’s awesome.
Janet Tressler Davis (19:23.706)
It’s not something you put that in writing and say, we think, but it’s just that you earn that respect. And I think that’s a way to notice it, I think.
Brandon Burton (19:32.494)
And it’s place where chambers belong. So hopefully if a chamber listening is not there right now, that’s somewhere to work towards for sure.
Janet Tressler Davis (19:37.322)
Yes.
Janet Tressler Davis (19:41.919)
And I know some smaller chambers in our state of Ohio have said, you know, we have a small staff, haven’t had, I just don’t have time to do this. And it is hard because if you only have one or two staff member team, it’s tough because it is a whole nother aspect. But if you can lean on your members to help too. So if there’s interest, oftentimes they can drive the agenda. Maybe you don’t have to set that agenda the whole time, or maybe you meet every other month, but to pull together a group of people to be able to talk about business issues.
impacting their business right today that it’s just invaluable, I think.
Brandon Burton (20:15.51)
Yeah, and that’s a good point for chambers of different sizes who may feel like, can’t take this on right now. How would you suggest they get started?
Janet Tressler Davis (20:27.176)
If you can talk about either to your board, your executive committee and find just two or three members that are passionate about it, that’s all it needs. Because that it’ll breed others. They’ll grow it, they’ll help sell it, but you can’t force it. So if there aren’t members that really want to do it, then it might not work. But that’s the same thing how we started our Women in Business Network is there was a few ladies and we talked about it. I said, would you guys think this would be a value? And they did. And then we just did like an informational meeting and it just.
grew from there. Same thing with our Young Leader Network, same thing there. So it’s, think for anything, if you have some members that are engaged and you, it’s not mission creep, I mean, it stays on your mission, that that’s a great way to get any committee started.
Brandon Burton (21:11.458)
Yeah, I think that’s great advice. Is there anything that we’re missing in the realm of these business advocacy councils that needs to be considered or things that you’ve learned over your career in having these business advocacy councils that could be beneficial for others to learn about and to maybe just be aware as they try to implement these?
Janet Tressler Davis (21:29.769)
Yeah.
Janet Tressler Davis (21:37.279)
Having an agenda, we call it a policy agenda, documented is really important. So those three areas that I told you that we track, the three at the state, three at the local level, we define what those are and we have them in writing. And then we, as a committee, did that. And then we present it to our board. And I do that every other year. And then when the board approves it, we’re able to take position on any issues that impact those areas, unless it’s a ballot issue. If it’s a ballot issue.
then we take that position that we’ve formed and take it to the board for their approval. But it gives you some leeway and liberty to be writing letters, know, letter campaigns and things, because oftentimes if there’s an issue, you need to get on it quickly because the vote’s coming, you know, in two days or four days. So you don’t want to wait and have to go to get board approval for every single thing. So that’s helped us. So a policy agenda. And then the next phase of our policy agenda says, if you do endorse an issue, what’s the procedure?
How much time do you have to give an advance notice of your board to give them the information to review it? You vote. And then what do you do with it? So if we’re supporting it, what’s our role? Do we serve on campaigns like levy campaigns? Do we help hand out signs? Do we do literature drops? How engaged should we be? And then what’s the post evaluation after the levy’s over to review what our role was and then whether it passed or failed, what could we have done differently? So that’s all in our policy agenda.
And I think having it documented that way when a member might bring something with you like H1V visas, for example, I that’s really important for some businesses that have international employees, but that hasn’t, that isn’t one of our top areas. And I’m not a lobbyist, no one in my office is, and there is only one person really working on it. And so we just have to kind of put some roadblocks on it to say, this is the areas that we track. So again, having it documented helps that explanation.
Brandon Burton (23:35.79)
Yeah, I think that’s so smart to have procedures in place when you decide to endorse some kind of policy. That way, nothing is just running ad hoc. You actually have a procedure that you’re following where there’s order to it and you don’t get anybody trying to override the will of the chamber.
Janet Tressler Davis (23:56.828)
Right.
Brandon Burton (23:57.838)
I was curious with the letter writing campaign. So you’ve mentioned that a couple of times. So as those opportunities arise, are you guys providing maybe like key bullet points or full on script or just an overall message? Is there any mention of the chamber in there that helps garner the support saying, you know, the greater business community here in Westerville is behind this?
What, how is that formulated as you push the letter writing campaigns?
Janet Tressler Davis (24:29.618)
Yeah, probably I’d say 20 years ago, we actually invested in software that will help you. If you plugged in where you lived, it would populate who your representatives are. And then it would actually have a letter. If you put in the topic and things, it would have a letter that would write it for you. And we did that for two years. Yeah, mean, that was up, but it was expensive. And so we didn’t keep it up after that. And so
Brandon Burton (24:47.79)
Pre-AI, that’s cool. Yeah.
Janet Tressler Davis (24:57.681)
And we didn’t actually use it a lot, but we did. So now when we have issues, it is bullet points, as you’ve originally said. we just, there is our Ohio Chamber on their website is a place that you can go, or you can even go to like your state legislature and you can plug in your address and find out your state reps very quickly. So we don’t need a software to do that anymore.
So we try to put that link in so people can find that to find the reps if they don’t know who their reps are. sometimes people will say, know, a letter writing, is that really good? I mean, do they just get a bunch of letters? Well, if they get a whole lot of letters, they have something to say, hey, you know, we got 69 or we got 500 letters on this particular issue. Maybe they didn’t read every single one of them, but they know that there’s some kind of interest or concern out there with their constituents. So there is some value in it. And then certainly phone calls.
We do, we’ll try to call, they won’t, oftentimes our legislators don’t take the calls, it’s their aides, which are fine too, to at least express our interest or concerns.
Brandon Burton (26:02.17)
Yeah. Yeah. But if you can become good friends with with the representatives aid, I mean, you’re you’re in, get them on your side. But to your point with the letter writing, you throw out the number 69, you know, if they received 69 letters, that’s a whole lot more than zero, shows that somebody cares about it. And as a if they were to dig in deeper and see where they’re coming from.
Janet Tressler Davis (26:09.467)
That’s right. Yep.
Brandon Burton (26:26.306)
then I think they could see, okay, this is a chamber that’s driving this, this is a business community, it’s affecting a lot more people than maybe just the 69 people that actually wrote the letter. So I think there’s still a lot of value.
Janet Tressler Davis (26:38.436)
Exactly. And then our Ohio Chamber now will send us information on state issues and ask, you know, if you will take support on it. And sometimes they’ll have all the talking points. So if it’s an area that we’ve already addressed, you know, we don’t just do it for issues because they ask because they might not be in the categories that we follow. So sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t do it.
Brandon Burton (27:01.698)
Yeah, that makes sense. That’s fair.
Janet Tressler Davis (27:03.973)
And you know, the other thing you mentioned is some things that do’s and don’ts. There are some chambers that will endorse candidates and we are not one of them, but people can. You can, as a chamber, you can give money to an issue, but as a chamber, you can’t give money to a candidate unless you have a pack. And we don’t have a pack either. But you know, there’s pros and cons, of course, if you get some meat behind your…
issues and you’re supporting individuals and they win, you know, then you’ve got them in your back pocket. My fear always is if you don’t get behind the winning candidate, it could be kind of difficult maybe to deal with that city council for a while if they knew that you didn’t support them. But certainly every chamber is different and I bet you people have great reasons why they would support candidates. We just don’t.
Brandon Burton (27:54.508)
Yeah, and ballots never go 100 % your way. So just be aware. Yeah. Well, Dan, I think you’ve shared some very valuable tips. I like asking for listeners who are out there and trying to elevate their chamber to the next level. What kind of tip or action item might you share with them in trying to accomplish that goal?
Janet Tressler Davis (27:58.85)
for sure. yeah, exactly.
Janet Tressler Davis (28:18.982)
More advocacy specifically or any goal.
Brandon Burton (28:21.359)
It could be advocacy or anywhere, yeah.
Janet Tressler Davis (28:24.54)
Okay. I think a tip, one tip is never have your board chair surprised. I always try to keep my board chair informed, whether it’s an email or a phone call. You know, we might have a one-on-one, but then two weeks after that one-on-one something’s come up and you still have to tell them, then you still want to inform them. I wouldn’t wait. And I always feel that if I never want them to be surprised, I guess, because if they didn’t hear it, why didn’t I hear that from you first? You know, I’d feel terrible if something like that happened.
Brandon Burton (28:54.744)
Yeah.
Janet Tressler Davis (28:54.939)
So that’s one tip. And then I’d say the other tip is that I try to keep my door open as much as I can. So if a member comes in and wants to meet or wants to schedule a meeting, I try to always do it because it’s their organization, right? If it wasn’t for our members, I wouldn’t have a job. So that’s how I view the value of listening to our members.
Brandon Burton (29:21.708)
Yeah, I think those are two great tips. I’ve heard the tip about not surprising your board chair before. And there’s a ton of wisdom in that because I’m sure there’s more than a handful of people that have listened that are listening that maybe have fallen into that trap or their board chair was surprised by something and they’ve learned that lesson the harder way. So if we can save people that pain, we’ll, we’ll try to encourage that.
Janet Tressler Davis (29:46.223)
Yeah. For sure.
Brandon Burton (29:49.634)
Well, I like asking everyone I have on the show about the future. So as we look to the future of Chambers of Commerce, how do you see the future of Chambers and their purpose going forward?
Janet Tressler Davis (30:01.933)
One I think is collaboration, partnerships. There’s so many organizations out there. Might not all represent businesses, but even if you look at Rotaries, really not as equal as us. I mean, not the same, right? They are C3s, we’re C6, but they take people’s time in your community. And for example, we have two Rotaries, we have a Sertoma Club, we have a JCs Club, and then we have our Chamber, and then you have other organizations.
it within your library, like there’s friends of organizations. And so people are always asking you for you to volunteer. And so I think that ways of events that we do or programs that we do, or can we partner with some of those where you might align? You have your uptown organizations. A lot of us have uptown or downtown business organizations. You have your visitors bureau. Where is there some alignment there? And then when you look at the bigger picture of chambers, you know, some smaller chambers, is it a value to partner?
with other chambers. I don’t know, I merge, sometimes you could merge, but we do that as a expo. We come together with three other chambers in our area. And I think it’s great to do that because it gives your members an opportunity to expand their network. I mean, they come to business after hours and luncheons. Yeah, but it just gives them another couple miles down the road of other people they can network with. So we do that once a year with three other chambers, there’s a of four.
Brandon Burton (31:16.866)
Yeah, cross-pollinate. Yeah.
Janet Tressler Davis (31:30.69)
And we have a hundred exhibitors and we try to rotate it around so it’s closer to one community than another each year, right? So sometimes you have to drive farther to get to it. And then for our young leaders and our women in business, we’ll try to partner with like neighboring chambers to get together with their young leader or women in business group just to, again, expand their network.
Brandon Burton (31:52.812)
Yeah. And I can imagine as you do those, those more informal kind of partnerships with chambers, like the women in business and the expos, it’s also shining a little bit of light on your community or whatever community is, you know, it’s at, at that time where these businesses that show up. Yeah. These businesses show up and they’re like, you know, I never considered joining multiple chambers, but maybe there’s value in being a member here too. So, I think there’s value on multiple levels in collaborating.
Janet Tressler Davis (32:08.099)
Getting to host it, yeah. Sure.
Janet Tressler Davis (32:26.297)
Absolutely, just learning best practices from each other is so good. sometimes I’ll have board members say, have you talked to other chambers around, we have an I-270, a freeway roundabout. And I say, yeah, we do, because we get together every month and talk. So it’s just kind of good to compare notes.
Brandon Burton (32:44.61)
Yeah, that’s great. Janet, this has been great. This has been a lot of fun. I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about your approach. Where would you point them? What would be the best way for them to connect with you?
Janet Tressler Davis (33:02.81)
My email address is jdavis@westervillechamber.com and my phone number is 614-882-8917. I’d welcome a call or email. I will be retiring on October 30th, but I do invite people if they still think I can provide them any value or questions. My personal email is jtdavis4943@gmail.
Brandon Burton (33:28.046)
Very good. Well, we’ll get that in our show notes and I’m glad we were able to get you on the show before you were officially retired and be able to document some of your experience and knowledge. But this has been very valuable and I appreciate you setting aside some time to be with us today on the podcast. Thank you.
Janet Tressler Davis (33:46.521)
Thank you so much. It’s been great and I really appreciate it. And I’m sure everybody will agree with me, but Chamber World, Chamber of Profession is wonderful.
If you are a chamber professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple podcast, Google podcasts, Spotify or now on YouTube. When you subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast new episodes will show up in your feed each week as they are released. If you’re finding value in this podcast, please leave us a rating and a review in iTunes. But most importantly, please share Chamber Chat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry.
