Your Business is Our Business

Nearly 18 months ago, we asked you, our members, what direction you want us to take.

Here’s what you said: Spend more time on business development. Offer more opportunities to help us grow our businesses. Enlarge the chamber’s roll in local education efforts.

I’m pleased to report that we are moving in that direction. Many of the community events the chamber was coordinating in years past are in the capable hands of other organizations or individuals. We are concentrating on business!

Thanks to partnership with UW-Marinette and Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, we’ve offered some great new programs.

In the past month alone, nearly two dozen members attended our Cross Cultural Communications Skills workshop at NWTC. During the workshop, conducted by Alem Asres, director of campus diversity for NWTC, participants discussed how to communicate appropriately with a wide range of people.

A week later, we held a workshop aimed at helping businesses determine if they should work with the federal government and its prime contractors. This was another great partnership with the Wisconsin Procurement Institute, the Procurement Technical Assistance Center of Michigan, the Small Business Association and NWTC.

Both of these programs are aimed at helping local businesses handle and benefit from the growth associated with Marinette Marine’s partnership with Lockheed Martin to build more littoral combat ships for the US Navy.

Our May Business for Breakfast featured Lisa Nyquist and Kathy Leone from Northern Initiatives, a Marquette, Mich.-based private, non-profit organization that offers small business loans and provides information and training for small businesses. (We liked the group’s Profit Mastery Class, a 16-hour training program that helps business owners use financial statements as management tools, understand and predict cash flow and plan for and manage growth. If this sounds like a course you can use, call us and we’ll put you in touch with Northern Initiatives.)

Finally, I’m delighted to announce that the chamber is piloting a Teacher Leadership Academy, similar to our Community Leadership Academy. Offered for the first time this summer, TLA will give teachers a chance to get inside area businesses and industries, develop relationships with plant managers and business leaders, share information gleaned from job shadow experiences, and finally, create a classroom project that links curriculum to area businesses.

This new program is a partnership with UW-Marinette’s Department of Continuing Education. Area teachers, school administrators, manufacturers and business people worked together to help develop it. Teachers will earn 3.2 Continuing Education Credits for their participation.
Finally, I want to mention how hard our Chamber Ambassadors have worked on a Shop Local awareness campaign that now includes lapel buttons urging people to buy locally. In the past, we’ve used billboards, Facebook, news releases and window decals. Now, you can show people everywhere you go that you care about local businesses. The buttons were donated by some of the Ambassadors themselves: That’s dedication!

We continue to solicit your input. We are currently working on revamping this publication. Watch for a readership survey sent to you by e-mail in the weeks ahead.

Meanwhile, drop by on weekdays between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., call, e-mail or message of via Facebook or our Website (www.mandmchamber.com). We want to hear from you!