Getting your chamber a seat at the table

Justin Groenert: If you're not at the table, you're on the menu. The one job that we have as chambers is to create the environment that allows our businesses to be successful. And ribbon cuttings are great and events are great and networking is great, but if we're not helping set the stage at a policy level, we're not really doing our jobs, I think, to the best of our ability.

Ted Wind: Hi, I'm Ted and I build software for chambers of commerce. For the past decade, chamber tools were all built the same way. One clunky system for every chamber. But if I've learned one thing, it's that no two chambers are alike. That's why on this show, we go beyond the ribbon cut with top chamber leaders to share the unique programs, processes, and what makes their chamber work, and to give you new ideas you can take back to your chamber. This is Beyond the Ribbon Cut.

Welcome back to Beyond the Ribbon Cut, the podcast for chamber leaders. I'm your host, Ted Wind from Diagonal for Chambers, and my guest today is Justin Groenert, chief strategy officer of the Evansville Regional Economic Partnership in Indiana. Justin, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Justin Groenert: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Ted Wind: We're excited to kick it off here. Now, to get started, I'd love if you could give our listeners at home a little bit of the lay of the land. What is the Evansville Regional Economic Partnership and what does kind of the business community in Southwest Indiana look like?

Justin Groenert: Sure. We are a four-county regional economic development entity and a two-county chamber of commerce. 5 years ago, three legacy organizations here in Evansville and Southwest Indiana merged into a bigger sort of more focused organization. So we are the regional economic development entity for Gibson, Posey, Warrick and Vanderburgh counties. We are the local economic development entity. So the LEO for Vanderburgh and Posey and we are the Chamber of Commerce for Vanderburgh and Posey. So we have multiple facets to what we do. It is a a lot of territory to cover, but um and we also have our our sports commission as well. So they bring in high-profile NCAA sporting events. We had the central zones US swimming tournament 3 weeks ago here where there were 700 swimmers at our natatorium. So we are in the sports game as well which is a lot of fun especially come March when we host the OVC tournament for the men and the women. So we punch the first tickets into the big dance here in Evansville which is a lot of fun.

So, uh, you know, from a business community, uh, perspective, we are the third biggest city in the state. We are a tri-state region with northwest Kentucky and southeast Illinois kind of all merging together. We have a really good relationship uh, obviously with our friends in Kentucky. We don't really do as much with with Illinois from our from our regional, you know, focus, but that's not to say that we have any issues with with our friends in Illinois. We just don't have a lot of of interactions there.

But um again, we're a heavy manufacturing state, a heavy manufacturing region. You go back to World War II, we supplied most of the ammunition and the LST boats and the P-47 bombers. So, we are a fairly large manufacturing region. Obviously, we have two very large hospital systems. We have three colleges and universities here, the University of Southern Indiana, the University of Evansville, and Ivy Tech uh community college. So we have a very nice higher ed footprint as well. So it's a it's a dynamic community collaboration really is everything here and we'll talk more about that I'm sure as we we get this conversation going.

Ted Wind: Definitely. Definitely. And as you mentioned a lot of those legacy organizations coming together that also means kind of increased member expectations too. Could you share a little bit more of kind of what members expect from an organization that's both a chamber but also an economic development?

Justin Groenert: Yeah, I mean I think it's driving it's building a workforce that stays. It's having a dynamic community that recruits dynamic people here and keeps them here. It's finding those quality of place projects that again encourage people to live, work, and play here. And I think it's one of the things that we do really well. the chamber, you know, has won national chamber of the year in 2016, so 10 years ago. So, we have always sort of been on the front of really exciting stuff. And I think our members appreciate that. I know our board meetings rarely stick to an hour because there's just so much we're trying to to fit in.

So, I I think yeah, it does it certainly makes us all bring our A-game, but I think it also instead of having board members and three different staffs, you know, running around to three organizations trying to collaborate, now we're all on the same roof and we're all kind of going the same way. So, I think it's been a real asset to the community. I think the three organizations were successful in what they did, but you know, COVID and a lot of the the world that we've sort of shifted into is sort of laid the reality out that we would work better together. And I think that's proven to be right.

So, I mean, like any merger, it's it's always bumpy and interesting. And, you know, I came in kind of two years into the merger, but again, I knew most of the players from my previous stint at the Southwest Indiana Chamber. So, you know, it was like coming home, but the walk on the elevator was a little different. It took me about 6 weeks to take the left off the elevator and not the right to my old office.

Ted Wind: I love that 100%. And I mean, one of the reasons why I'm so excited to have you on today's episode is we really want to talk about advocacy work. One thing that's so incredible about your chamber is you just take a look on your website. There's a whole tab dedicated to all the different advocacy programs that you guys are doing. We're going to be jumping into that shortly. But before that, I'd love if we could share a little bit more about your background, right? So, you are pretty involved in government, the political scene before kind of crossing over into chamber work. Could you share a little bit more about that road and maybe what it taught you about kind of being a chamber leader?

Justin Groenert: Absolutely. So, I I went to college at Western Kentucky University, thought I was going to be a journalist. I made it through my first class period of my first journalism class and was like, nope, this isn't going to be it. And so, I got into political science and and I worked for the football team. So, you know, fast forward a couple years, you're about to graduate. And I'm like, am I going to do the football thing and do laundry for the rest of my life or am I going to go into politics and and go down the public service route?

Fortunately enough, I ended up going down the route of of public service and was fortunate enough to get a couple of really cool internships with Ron Lewis, who was the congressman for Kentucky's second, the summer after I graduated in his district office. And it's amazing what happens when you learn how to work that phone system because you get to be the really cool intern that doesn't have to be babysat on the phones. And that, you know, really great experience in a district office opened my eyes to a whole different world of a role of what government officials do and sort of left that sort of imprint in the back of my mind.

And I was fortunate enough to go to Washington. I interned for Senator Mitch McConnell uh in the fall of '04 and then worked on Capitol Hill after that. So was doing policy work, writing letters, responding to constituent mail, giving tours, which might have be the coolest job I ever got to do is wander around the capital with with constituents and telling stories about all the the cool places within the capital building.

and then just sort of, you know, got to a point where that boss had retired. I moved to Nashville for a year and realized I wasn't made for a cubicle and had the opportunity to move home to run a congressional campaign for a guy that was a cardiothoracic surgeon, Larry Bucshon, who was running for office in 2010. That's what got me to Evansville again after kind of figuring I'd never move home again. You know how that goes. the boomerang swung back and worked for him for for several years and got to that point where two-year cycle is not a really great way to sort of plan out your life.

And the Southwest Indiana Chamber had their government affairs position opened and I think Christy kind of heard my name around and I had you know I heard about it and made a couple quick phone calls and I'll never forget during the interview Christy asked me you know where I saw myself in 5 years and I literally before I could stop myself I laughed out loud because I didn't know what a five year I didn't know what five years looked like because you're so ingrained in a congressional cycle that you can't look two years ahead. you can be really good at your job, but somebody does something that you had nothing to do with and you're out of a job. And so I laughed and thought I wasn't going to get the job because I had insulted her somehow. She thought it was hilarious later when I told her that story.

And she hired me as the government affairs guy at the Southwest Indiana Chamber and it changed everything. I kind of came into it as this guy that was going to be a lobbyist and this was just sort of the first step of moving to Indy or moving back to DC and doing the high-powered lobbying thing because that's just what you do, right? She kept telling me, "No, I think you're a chamber guy." And I'm like, "No, no." And I'll tell you, I was at Midwest Institute. It was my first full day of class. It was probably the after lunch session. And I texted her and I said, "Damn it, Christy, you're right. I'm a chamber guy." And she goes, "I knew it." And uh it's been that way ever since.

You know, I took a one-year stint as as chief of staff to our state treasurer and that was an opportunity I just I couldn't pass up. But it took me not real long to realize I needed to get back in and Christy Gillenwater was in Chattanooga and called and said, "You're moving." And that was the job interview and I moved to Chattanooga and I've been in chamber world ever since.

So again, I think it's just it's the impact you can have on a community in a way that isn't as cutthroat as politics can get. You get to do all the fun stuff without having to do the brass knuckle stuff that that has to happen. And I've been very fortunate to be able to work in places that I've really I've come to care about. Like when you get to come home and work on your hometown, like that that means more to me than it's more than just a job, right? because my family still lives here. My parents are still here. My, you know, we moved back and with a three-month-old and he's going to grow up here and our second daughter is going to grow up here.

It's been a really cool, unique experience to be able to come home twice now. I've told my mother that the boomerangs buried in the backyard at this point because of the impact you can have on communities that mean something to you that made you who you are. And that's been really the cool thing for me and I'm grateful that I got the opportunity to come back in current role I have and still get to kind of do the things that make Evansville the great place it is.

Ted Wind: I love that and common theme on the pod with almost everyone we talk to. It's like once you get a taste of the Chamber World, it brings you in.

Justin Groenert: That's exactly right, man. It's the thing. And you know, I think the other thing too about Chamber World is I don't know that I've met anybody that I'm not friends with. You know what I mean? Like it's just this wild community of people that get it and we're all in it together and we know it. And there's very little competition. There's very little elbow. You know, R&D is rob and duplicate, not researching. And so, you know, I think that is as much of of why I love it as anything else. I mean, the people that I've met through this line of work are people that I'll talk to if and when I do something else. You know, those relationships won't go away. And I think that's really the cool thing about this industry and what we all get to do.

Ted Wind: Mhm. 100%. 100%. Now, I'd love to kind of dive into the meat of the episode. Obviously, your background in government, in politics, really, I think, set you up in a strong position to do some of this really incredible advocacy work. However, something you know we hear from chamber leaders constantly is we do the ribbon cuttings, we do the networking events, the awards dinners, all those things. But when it comes to advocacy work, we're always trying to figure out how is the best way to play this, especially when it involves the big scary word of politics, right? We don't want to lose any members. You've bet your whole career really on on the opposite and embracing this advocacy work as much as possible. Can you make the case why is advocacy one of the biggest value-adds a chamber can offer?

Justin Groenert: Well, I think one of the things that I've learned or I've heard I've got a couple of quotes that have stuck with me throughout my career and I heard Governor Daniels say it once and I think it's been attributed to Al Capone at one point, but if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. And to me, the one job that we have as chambers is to make our businesses in an environment that can make them successful. And ribbon cuttings are great and events are great and networking is great, but if we're not helping set the stage at a policy level, we're not really doing our jobs, I think, to the best of our ability.

I think the other thing that gets conflated is advocacy versus politics, right? They're they're two different things. They're cousins and they run parallel, so you have to be aware of it. But the idea that you're getting into politics because you're advocating a position on a policy that is detrimental to your businesses is not the same thing. And I think it comes back to, you know, separating those two things out.

I think it's making sure that you have the right relationships with the elected officials at the city council at in your state delegation at the federal level depending on what the issue is. And if you're in front of them and they know who you are and you have done the work of figuring out where your members are, your voice matters and it needs to be at the table. like every chamber where you've seen one chamber, you've seen one chamber, you've seen one advocacy department, you've seen one advocacy department.

There's a thousand ways to eat a whale. It's which tact do you want to take? And I think it's understanding that it's not a high-powered lobbyist or having a PAC or all of sort of the more sophisticated things chambers can do. It's as simple as going to a city council meeting and being seen. It's having a cell phone number of a city councilman that you know and trust to have a conversation when some of your businesses find a problem. It's knowing who your state representatives are and following your state chambers policy work to know what's going on. I think all of those things are government affairs, right? And so I think it's not letting the scope of the work overtake the importance of the work and starting small, figuring out who those people on your membership team or in your membership that want to be involved in public policy, you know, creating a committee. Those sorts of things are pretty standard and easy.

And then it's just showing up and being seen. And at some point someone's going to ask hey why is the chamber here and you know it could just be look we're just paying attention and that in and of itself sends a message right so I think all of those things are why we should be doing this at a higher level because we live in a dynamic world that's changing faster than any of us can keep up with and if we're having a hard time keeping up with it you know the small business owner on Main Street that's just trying to keep his lights on don't have time.

So, it's really our job and our responsibility, I think, as chamber professionals to help that guy who doesn't have time for it to know that his interests are being protected and advocated for at whatever level of government that is. You don't have to scale Washington, right? Like have your congressman come in for a round table and that be the extent of it, but you're giving them the access that they wouldn't normally have. And I think Being a convenor and being that sort of tip of the spear in terms of getting your members educated on just what's happening is a great first step.

Ted Wind: Yeah. And you talked about that like not letting the scope of the work overtake the importance of it. I'd love if we could get into the playbook a little bit and obviously every chamber's advocacy program is going to look a little bit different but some of your highlights right in Chattanooga you ran uh public policy for four years. You did annual day at the state house, federal focus programming. Could you walk us through how you stood up an advocacy program from scratch?

Justin Groenert: Sure. In fairness, we had a really good program in Evansville. and you know, Steve Schaefer and Sally Rideout, who's now our contract lobbyist here in Evansville. Like, I had people that had done it before that had congressional experience and state house experience before me was really how I learned how to do it.

And um I'm grateful for those relationships. And I also came to it with relationships at the federal level that were relevant too, which helped. But moving to Chattanooga, all of those relationships went away. I had two phone numbers when I moved there. And they were both people from Evansville that had moved to Chattanooga. So I knew nobody, right?

And Chattanooga had been involved in public policy and they had a government affairs committee, but they didn't have a staffer that was dedicated just to public policy. They were doing workforce. They were doing education programming. They were doing a whole bunch of other stuff. And when Christy got there, you know, she saw the value of workforce and education work being its own standalone thing. and she understood the value of of government affairs being its own thing. So from that standpoint, I didn't walk into it cold. There was a government affairs committee, but they didn't have the expertise and having people that were in the state house all the time and and there were a couple of political missteps that happened that got everybody kind of scared of their own shadow a little bit that we really kind of put processes in place first to kind of help mitigate some of that.

You know, during the legislative session, I was there at least a day a week visiting with legislators across the board with our legislative agenda. Having a dynamic board, I think a committee is helpful because they're the ones that are going to help give you, you know, real-time feedback of what is important to the broader membership. they have relationships that I didn't have that they could help me bridge some of those early relationships with legislators outside of just our delegation and could give me, you know, the good word to those elected officials cuz I was the guy from Indiana, right? I wasn't from Chattanooga and there's, you know, you go down south, there's a certain suspect, right? You're not from around here and you had to kind of fight that a little bit and and I think we did okay there.

So from there it's once you get sort of the backbone of it, it's really just how can you give your members access, right? I mean to me that is as big a piece of it. So, a day at the state house is really, I think, one of the more important things that a chamber can do because it's one thing when you talk to a legislator in their backyard, right, where they're looking for things to do, it's a different conversation.

When you show up to the state house and you show up to Washington and they're in the middle of a committee hearing and they're in the committee and they're in the middle of walking hallways with every lobbyist they've seen every day for the entirety of the legislative session and they see 15 of their businesses show up in the hallway. That leaves a lasting mark because a they're friendly faces in most cases, right? they're constituents and that puts you at the head of the line in terms of of getting a meeting or again sending that message that we're involved and we're engaged.

So I think something like that is very important in terms of federal focus. That was an event that they had never really done before where we would kind of have a conversation with some sort of I don't want to say nonpartisan but sort of not a hyper political partisan speaker that could give some objective view of what was going on in Washington and then we would do a Q&A with one of the two state US senators and the congressman and kind of get the perspective from the local perspective.

So, those are events I think that are are fairly easy to do. Again, most of your elected officials are looking for opportunities like that to get in a room with 50 to 100 of their constituents. And those are some easy things that you can do and make some money off of quite frankly because you can sell tickets and there's not a large lift.

Day at the state house in in Chattanooga, we would rent a bus and take a bus up. In Evansville, everybody just meets at the capital at the prescribed time and they all just drive up themselves. So you don't have to take it, you know, you don't have to spend a lot of money to do these things. It's a lot of it's the coordinating the meetings and coordinating where you're going to meet in the state house. I think there's some coordination there that you do need to kind of keep tabs on, but you know, there's 100 ways to do it. And I think it's just committing to doing it and then letting your volunteers kind of help with meetings and that sort of thing.

Ted Wind: Yeah, 100%. And I love how in the beginning there you talked a little bit about some of the best ways you learned how to effectively run some of these advocacy programs was through collaboration with some of the folks that have already have already done it, right? Whether that's other chamber leaders, whether that's other folks that are involved in shaping public policy. I think that ties really nicely into some of the really big wins that you guys have been having recently. Right. So, uh, you just pulled in $95 million across two rounds of Indiana's READI program and are also working on a huge project for the I-69 Ohio River Crossing that's slated for completion in 2031. For wins that are that large, can you talk a little bit more about kind of how collaboration plays a role there?

Justin Groenert: Sure. I mean, for us, collaboration was everything. You know, going back even further than READI, one of the projects that we worked on when Mike Pence was governor was a thing called Regional Cities. And it really was sort of, you could look at the Oklahoma City MAPS model as to kind of how they wanted to model it where regions like the city of Oklahoma had seven projects. they were going to pass a a one- cent sales tax to fund those seven projects and there was no changing the projects. You voted on the plan up or down and and that was it.

And so Indiana in trying to sort of promote a more regional approach to economic development said, "We're going to try this out. We're going to pilot it. We're going to give away two awards of I think 45 million maybe. I I can't remember. It's been a while, but it was a significant chunk of money. But the idea was regions were going to put plans together for a set number of projects that had local government buy in, that had private sector buy in, and the state was going to come alongside and kind of do the but-for money, right? So, they were going to put 45 million into two communities, and we all had to pitch. What were the projects?

And in southwest Indiana, it was four counties. It was the four counties that we've talked about. And we did it really well because we've had a regional approach to economic development for a long time. So Gibson County and Posey County and Warrick County and Vanderburgh County all kind of knew Evansville was going to be the anchor, but everybody else a benefits when Evansville wins and b to leverage that win with wins around the region.

nobody kind of started elbowing and we were able to kind of get buyin from everybody very early and we led the state in that effort and based on the success of Regional Cities then Indiana went into the READI projects and it's the same similar concept where communities and regions put together set plans based on kind of what guidelines the state wants you to focus on whether it's housing or quality of place or whatever and and we've been able to to win maximum um amounts of money out of those two programs and the results are literally billions of dollars of economic impact in southwest Indiana. It's really been a huge catalyst for us certainly in terms of right sizing our housing supply some of those quality of place measures that just you wouldn't be able to do without sort of a coordinated effort of bringing private dollars, local dollars, and state dollars together. We've been able to capitalize on that.

So collaboration's really been the secret sauce in southwest Indiana for a long time. And and shifting gears to the Ohio River crossing, you know, Indiana or Evansville had long been the largest city in the country without a direct route to its state capital. For whatever reason, when they did the 1950s interstate program, they failed to complete I-69. They built it from Michigan to Fort Wayne to Indianapolis and then stopped.

And so for 60 years, we've been talking about trying to get I-69 completed from Evansville, Indianapolis. We were all so laser focused on it that when Mitch Daniels passed Major Moves and we were going to get Evansville to Indianapolis, everybody was super pumped as and rightly so. One of those kind of great days to be around when Mitch did the ribbon cutting and he was on his motorcycle on an interstate that that wasn't open yet. We could all drive as fast as we wanted. It was kind of fun, but we realized shortly thereafter that there's a river right behind, you know, Evansville and and I-69 just becomes a cul-de-sac if we don't build a bridge to connect Kentucky, which then moves it basically gets you unfettered interstate access from Canada to Memphis.

So, we very quickly built on the momentum from I-69 and it was one of those unique deals where I think one of the last meetings I had as a congressional staffer with Congressman Bucshon was about the I-69 bridge and literally two weeks later I think one of the first meetings I had at the other end of the table was as the government affairs guy about the I-69 bridge. So that's really been sort of my my big passion project as a government affairs guy in southwest Indiana.

But it literally took the collaboration of the chamber in Henderson and the chamber in Evansville saying, "Hey, look, like we've got to get this done." And we built the separate entity that's housed at E-REP called BridgeLink. And it was local government officials. It was local business leaders in Henderson and Evansville coming together and saying, "Hey, look, we got to get this bridge done." and we've got some very passionate people that don't take no for an answer. Um, I think that certainly helps and that have rolodexes that could pick up the phone and call the governor and call the the DOT chairs. I mean, we picked the right people to really sort of make our case.

You know, Traylor Construction, you know, is a massive bridge builder that's in our backyard in Evansville. He was very helpful in sort of laying out what was a realistic price tag for a bridge. We tackled what are ways that we could finance it and we said from the beginning we're gonna have to toll it. It's going to be a toll project and we led on the education piece on that because no one wants tolls, right? Until until they do till you got to build something big, right? And so we took the lumps on that early and we said, "Hey, look, this is going to be a toll project." And we had local governments passing resolutions supporting, you know, tolling the bridge to get it going.

And before long, you now have this like coalition of two communities in two different states rowing the same way, speaking from the same playbook. The legislators on both sides of the river were supportive and talking to each other. I mean, we had a couple of roundtables with the Kentucky delegations and Indiana delegations in the state house talking to each other saying, "Hey, look, you've got to talk to your guys. We'll talk to our guys and we've got to get to yes.

And so we recently had a group from both Kentucky and Indiana met with US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy in his office. And I'll bet you there were seven members of Congress. There were two DOT both state DOTs, the governor of one state, chief of staff to the other governor in the meeting. and he walks in and he goes, "I've never seen two states in the same room talking the same way ever." I mean, and I think that's the kind of thing that that if you can pull off as a chamber, you can get a lot done.

And we've been working on this bridge for 13 years, which sounds like a long time, but in the span of a federal bridge that's going to be probably 1.2 billion when it's done, that's pretty lightning fast to get all of the hoops done. And it was because we had the right people. We found the right people at the table. We had a moment in time when transportation infrastructure was the thing. We met the moment and we got it done. And and again, Indiana's approach work is going to finish in September, October probably. We'll know the design build team in early November and it's off to the races to build a bridge. So in 2031, I look forward to having one last BridgeLink meeting when we cut the ribbon on that thing.

So yeah. Yeah. So again, that was it's been kind of neat to be able to come back. When I left, it was it was, you know, we were in the environmental phase, so it was at a pretty good point. To be able to come back and kind of now get to see the project through has been really probably the most fun about coming home.

Ted Wind: Yeah. I mean, those big wins obviously are so incredible and such cool stories to hear about. I do want to bring it back though for the chamber leaders listening that maybe only have two or three staff, right? And not a dedicated advocacy team or anything like that. Where do they start in getting advocacy off the ground? If you go back to maybe your time in Chattanooga or times when advocacy was just getting started, you had to build it from scratch. Where does this small chamber get started here?

Justin Groenert: I I think it's a having a conversation with your board and getting them comfortable with the idea of we need to probably have some idea of where our members are.

If you can have a government affairs committee, it's it's who are those who are those people in your membership portfolio that maybe have a government affairs person that can come to a meeting once a month and kind of help be those eyes and ears when they're in the state house. If you don't have the ability to spend a lot of time in the hallways, find those companies that do cuz they're there and lean on them for some advice, you know, outside of the committee, poll your membership, like what are the important issues.

I think getting a handle on what are the pinch points for your businesses, what are the policy issues at the local level and the state level that matter. And then I think it's once you kind of know that and you have some dedicated members that are interested in helping you out, then you can come up with the okay, well maybe we do need to start going to a city council meeting and talking about X or maybe we do need to have a day at the state house and try to gauge interest that way.

You know, a blurb in your newsletter. Everybody communicates. I think that's an easy way to get feedback or at least educate your members on things that you're working on or that you're interested in from a policy perspective. And I think those are some easy starting points.

And then from there, you sort of build it out, right? Once you kind of get a handle on where your members are, then okay, what are the policy positions that we can take that we can send? you know, what are the four or five pillar things that we care about? Taxes, infrastructure, child care, fighting the fight on data centers one way or the other. Like, you know, pick what are the things that are really sort of matter to your community and to your members and then pick one or two of them and just start kind of small and let it organically grow.

Cuz as your members see success, you will get more people involved. You will get more expertise there. And as government leaders start to trust that you're not playing politics, but that you're just trying to educate them on where their constituents are, they'll start looking to you. And I think that's that's really where the the secret sauce is, is when they start asking you, hey, what do you guys think about this? Or we're thinking about this. Do you know, where do you think the business community is going to come down on it? And that's that's as much relational as it is, you know, a system or a process, right? So, I think having those relationships is really important.

And then being able to articulate your story, I think, is really important, too. Like, what do your members care about?

Ted Wind: Bread and butter, I think, of every chamber, right, is the relationships there.

Justin Groenert: Yeah. And you cannot undersell those. And again, it's even if it's not let's have a government affairs committee and it's not you know let's write a big policy agenda have a roundtable you know host your elected officials and let your businesses have an opportunity to talk directly to them I mean it's as simple I mean it can be as simple as that and I think elected officials learn as much or more that way than they do any other way anyway and so even if you're not taking a policy position be the convenor you know be the place where the city council and the mayor or state rep can come and get 15 to 20 of your business members in a room and say, "Hey, look, let's talk. What are your issues? I'm going to talk about kind of what I'm working on and then, you know, what do you need help with?" And I think that is as much an advocacy win as anything, right? Because that's really where you're directly giving your members value.

Ted Wind: 100% 100%. Really well said. And I I think it covered a lot of great ground there. Justin, last question we like to ask all our guests on the show. Closes every episode out. What's one last piece of advice you'd give to the other chamber leaders that are listening into the show today?

Justin Groenert: Go to Institute. Go through Institute. I think you will learn a ton of information. If you're a CEO and you're a seasoned CEO, you'll find something new that you haven't thought of.

I think the value that I had in my four years there from 2015 to 2018 in Midwest was I came into government affairs from government. I didn't come from chamber world, right? And it's a different thing. Like it took me a long time to kind of figure it out, but I really kind of had my my focus was I'm the government affairs guy. I don't need to I don't care about membership. I don't care about event. I mean, I did, but you know, I'm not getting involved. like I'm right here.

And I think the thing that Institute taught me as a staffer was I had a better understanding of how all the pieces fit and how my work could enhance their work in ways that I had never even considered. And I think again when you're the guy that is a value ad, finding ways for you to engage with your membership team and your stack of members that you're trying to sell. If I need to go on a meeting, ask me to go on a meeting and I'll sell the public policy piece to it. Or do we need to have a public policy event that we haven't thought of before? How do we get more people to lunch with the governor or create a policy focus event?

You know, that just wasn't on my radar before I went through Institute. So, it really was very eye opening. I've met some of the best people in my life through Institute and I it does certainly also give you a sense of solitude that every time you feel like you're on an island by yourself dealing with an issue, believe me, there are 15 other chamber people that are your friends that are dealing with the same thing.

So go to Institute would be my one big piece of advice. Build your rolodex as much as you can and then call them because they'll answer. Those are kind of my two sort of I I'll leave you with that.

Ted Wind: Love it. Love it. And I think on today's episode, obviously, you know, the broader theme was advocacy, but I think the thing that really stuck out to me was whether it was just we talked about with institute, whether it's working with other communities in in other states to get large advocacy projects done, whether it's, you know, engaging with your members, bringing them in to city meetings, town halls, state house visits, etc. The key thing with all of this is collaboration between you, your constituents, other chamber leaders, etc. So, I I mean, I think that is one of the biggest takeaways today.

As both Justin and I mentioned earlier, a big thing we want chamber leaders doing is R&D, rob, rob, rob, and duplicate. Check out the Evansville Regional Economic Partnership. We have their links in the description below. Especially check out that advocacy tab. There's some lot of great insights that you can take and utilize at your chamber as well.

But I just want to say again, Justin, thank you so much for coming on the pod. And to everyone listening, thanks for tuning in to Beyond the Ribbon Cut. We'll catch you on the next episode.