This comes after 49 applications were received and five were identified as viable candidates. Those five were interviewed via Skype.
The two finalists are William C. Clow and Jim D. Trzinski.
The chamber has provided opportunities for interviews of the two finalists.
A decision on the position could come next week.
Today’s interview was with Clow, who was the executive director of the Rhinelander Area Chamber of Commerce in Wisconsin from 2015-16. He has also served as director of community outreach for the Harvard Community Unit School District in Harvard, Illinois, from 2005-15 as well as other marketing and communication positions dating back to 1992.
He holds an MBA in marketing and a bachelor of science in advertising from the University of Illinois in Champaign.
What attracted you to this job?
I like working in chambers, I like the work of chambers. I’m attracted to that type of work. I think it’s the combination of community support, community advocacy and the variety of a chamber job that attracts me. It’s also what makes it a crazy job but that’s part of the appeal also.
I’ve been to North Carolina as a visitor. We used to vacation with my ex-wife’s family just east of here in the Outer Banks several summers. I’ve been to Charlotte a few times for different meetings so I was not unfamiliar with North Carolina. I haven’t been to this particular area but when I started talking to them about this job, when I started looking into it I loved the feel of it, I love the potential of it, the people I talked to sound great and sound like they’d be great people to work with, a nice place to live and great people to work with, what more could you ask for?
What do you see as the potential for the area?
Anytime you have a small town or a county with a bunch of small towns, you have kind of a lot of potential. You can go a lot of different ways and I think Halifax County, from what I’ve been able to observe, there’s a lot of different types of growth going on in some of the towns as it is.
The potential is going to be different for every part of the county.
There’s no one answer to that, it’s going to be fluid with what the different communities want. As a chamber, I don’t see it as our role to dictate what that growth looks like. I see it as our role to work with the communities, work with the organizations within the communities to help support that growth and to help advocate for that growth. As a chamber of commerce we can provide resources, can provide advocacy, can provide counsel to help communities that are looking to do certain things. Those are going to be widely different. I suspect you’ll there are towns that would want more industrial growth. I know we have an industrial park right in this town. Obviously that’s casting a die in a certain direction. I suspect there are communities that have cast the die in more of a tourism direction or more in an arts direction. Those are very viable means for growth if you have the mechanisms and infrastructure to make that happen.
How do you build on what’s been previously done at the chamber?
Chambers are membership organizations. Our activities or events have to support our members and our potential members. The way we do that is by customer service and providing to those members by listening to those members and finding out what they need and what they’re looking for. Part of that is communications. I think that all stems out of developing relationships and building relationships and nurturing relationships between the members and the communities that the Roanoke Valley Chamber of Commerce serves. That’s one of the things I feel I have some skills at is that I am good at listening and good at hearing what people have to say. I have a variety of experience in my background. I can relate to a lot of different people from a lot of different perspectives. Building those relationships then help me and the Roanoke Valley chamber to make that value proposition.
I’m talking to a potential member or a member and I have to be talking to them about the value they’re getting out of their chamber membership and part of that value is going to be belief in what we’re doing. That comes from having that relationship, building that trust with them, having the communication mechanisms in place that they hear about what we’re doing and understanding our perspective.
What do you do to serve these members?
That’s one of the challenges of a chamber. We serve everything from big industrial companies to home-based businesses. What a chamber can provide those businesses varies. For smaller companies, for retail and commercial, businesses that are working within the marketplace, a lot of that is helping to promote their business, helping them connect with potential customers. You do things like home expo, the business expo. You do things like communication tools to help them get the word out about different things they are doing.
For some of the industrial companies that aren’t necessarily selling directly, they are looking for other things. So whether it’s providing training for some of their staff, you have to make sure you understand what they are doing and provide that. It’s going to be a variety.
When I hopefully start here I want to go out and talk to a lot of the members and potential members and hear what they’re looking for and hear what they like about what the chamber’s doing, hear what they’d like to see the chamber doing and factor that in.
Every business is looking for different things. You’ve got to live and breathe it for a little bit, you’ve got to talk to people. My first couple of weeks here is going to be a lot of listening and a lot of reaching out to people and talking as much as I can about what they are looking for. From that we will start developing some of those strategies on how we reach out to them and how we provide them with that value.
Do you see the role of a chamber president as someone who is actively trying to recruit new business and industry here?
I think I see the role of the president of the chamber as an active supporter of that. A lot of recruitment of new business falls more into the economic development realm. Obviously, we work very closely together. (Halifax County Economic Development Director) Cathy (Scott) and I will work closely together and bringing new business helps existing business which is what I would do.
I see the chamber and the chamber president being an active participant in that but I don’t see that as being something that we lead. That’s Cathy’s job and one of the things that I’m a big believer in is teamwork and coordination and cooperation. I haven’t met a chamber yet that has more resources than they have challenges. Given that, you’ve got to cooperate and coordinate in order to maximize how much impact you can have on the community.
What person, book or experience has helped you the most in life?
One of the things that helped me the most was in graduate school. I taught a class. It helped me in a couple of different ways.
One, it helped because it paid for graduate school, but most importantly it taught me to believe in myself. Twice a week I was getting in front of this class of college students who were only a couple of years younger than me and having to lead this class, I was the only they saw. The professor wrote the syllabus but I wrote and graded all the exams. I was the only one they saw so as far as these students were concerned I was the teacher. I had to have my stuff together because, talk about a skeptical audience, that’s the most skeptical audience you’re going to have, plus it was an experiential learning class so there was a lot of class discussion. It wasn’t like shut up and listen to me, it was very involved and engaged. That experience gave me the confidence and the understanding of the need to prepare and to do your groundwork and to be ready, but also to trust in my ability to think on my feet and to deal with the individuals of the classroom. A lot of this job is not that different from teaching.
Why do you feel you are qualified for this job?
I’ve had success in this type of job before. I’ve been an executive director. I’ve been on several chamber boards including one in which I did what (Interim chamber president) Ruby (Gerald) has done in that we were in a transition and I filled in and kind of ran the chamber on a volunteer basis while we were doing a search. I’m familiar with a number of different chambers.
Chambers are about understanding people and communities. I’ve been involved with people in communities in all my jobs. I’ve been the spokesperson for almost every organization I’ve worked for, for about 25 years. I have experience and I’m comfortable doing that. I have a business background. I started a radio station as a volunteer and I’ve got an FM license and it’s still running without me somehow. I have a variety of experience which I think is important for a chamber president. I’m going to be able to go out and relate and speak the language of a lot of our members. If I’m not familiar with their industry specifically I have the ability to understand where they’re coming from.
