The new business owner who called the I-94 West Chamber of Commerce wasn't calling to join anything. She'd taken over another company's storefront and hadn't changed the signage, so customers kept walking in expecting the old business — and left furious about gift cards issued by an owner who no longer existed. By the time she dialed the Chamber, she'd decided she hated this town. Mindy Smith, the Chamber's president, didn't sell her anything or invite her to an event. She told her to cover the signage — literally, with sheeting or a cheap vinyl banner — and pointed her toward sign shops and Chamber members who could help fast. They talked for two hours. About a banner.
If that's not what you thought a chamber of commerce did, you're in good company. The confusion runs deep enough that Mindy has fielded calls from people trying to call in late for jobs that aren't at the Chamber, and from people trying to quit them. For the record: a chamber is not city hall, and not a government office. It's a membership organization — more than six hundred businesses across the I-94 West corridor, Maple Grove included — that exists to make those businesses work better. That means connecting them to each other, putting them in front of the community, and answering the phone on the day everything goes sideways. Once a year, at the State of the Cities Luncheon, it means putting the mayors themselves in front of the room to report in.
Today, though, the phone can wait: the Chamber is throwing its member appreciation cookout under a pop-up tent in a Rogers parking lot, burgers coming off the grill courtesy of a man in a "No Name" apron — the steak brand, not a personality trait — beneath a banner reading "We ❤ Our Members." The six hundred that spend the other 364 days a year heads-down in their own shops are, for one lunch hour, just people passing each other paper plates — and Mindy built the room where that happens.
She doesn't run it alone, either. Alongside her is Abby Ciesynski, the Chamber's Membership & Marketing Director. Mindy's on the phone walking somebody through a signage crisis; Abby's the one making sure this cookout runs without a hitch. Between the two of them, nothing in this organization runs on luck.
Working the crowd in a teal J&B T-shirt is Amy Valek, who chairs the Chamber's board when she isn't representing the protein supplier on her shirt. "We're not a consumer business," she tells me. "People don't come into our facility." This cookout is J&B's storefront.
That's the two halves of this organization: the cookout gets you in the tent, and the two-hour phone call about a banner is why you stay.
Kyle Sabot, of Twin Cities Promotional, puts it bluntly: just being a member doesn't do much. "It's one of those types of organizations where you get out of it what you put into it," he says. Showing up is the actual membership fee. The Chamber's job is making sure that when you do, there's someone worth meeting.
"Practically every week" isn't a slogan here, it's verifiable. First Wednesday of the month, seventy-five-plus people turn up at Rush Creek Golf Club for Coffee & Conversation, at eight in the morning, voluntarily. Second Wednesday, it's the Ambassadors at Dave & Buster's. In the two weeks around this cookout alone: a ribbon cutting for the Stretch Zone on Main Street in Maple Grove and another for a Costco — yes, that Costco — and the Golf Tournament that Kyle insists, every year, he wins. Come November, better than two hundred members pack Rush Creek for the biggest one of the year. Mindy credits Dawn and Greg, the leaders before her, with setting that pace and creating the positive and welcoming culture. "They did not let anybody become cliquey," she says — no small feat with a group this size.
It doesn't stop at the membership, either. The Chamber funds scholarships for local schools and puts on an awards ceremony for first responders every year — the kind of thing nobody would ever trace back to a chamber unless somebody told them.
Bo Nelson has a basis for comparison — he belongs to five chambers across the state, and sits on this one's board. Five chambers. This one wins. "This is by far the most valuable one that I've been a part of," he says, and he doesn't hedge on why: leadership. Ask Mindy what she's gotten out of running it and she skips the mission-statement answer. A ton of these people, she says, are just her friends now. Not contacts. Friends.
Kyle calls it getting beyond the transactional. I've seen exactly what he means. I've made some of my best relationships in rooms like this one.
You get to know fifty different businesses here, and after a while it stops being networking and starts being knowing who to call. Yossi Aharoni is the marketing director at Kahuna Window Cleaning, and a while back he needed help getting a TV ad together. I knew the right people, made the introduction, no strings attached — he wasn't interested in the magazine at the time, and that was fine. Later, at an Ambassadors meeting, he turned to me and asked if we could meet up afterward. We ended up talking for hours — philosophy, politics, the kind of conversation that has nothing to do with either of our businesses.
That's the whole trick of this place. You don't burn a bridge here — you build relationships. You'll see them again next Tuesday. That would be awkward.
COME SEE FOR YOURSELF
Coffee & Conversation meets the first Wednesday of every month at 8 a.m. at Rush Creek Golf Club in Maple Grove. You don't have to be a member to walk in. Come find me — introducing people is the whole point. www.i94westchamber.org