North Brunswick Chamber of Commerce Gearing for Growth

What do you do if you're a forward-thinking Chamber of Commerce in the fastest growing section of one of the most-moved-to counties in the United States? In today's demanding high-tech, high-touch, high-speed world you probably oughta be doing a complete review of your mission, vision, services, service delivery systems, and marketing.

With 322 companies on the North Brunswick Chamber of Commerce rolls today, our membership is growing at a rate of more than 20% per year. We need to focus on, well, pretty much everything as we cope with and prepare for continued rapid growth.

Several NBCC board members, along with representatives from many other greater Wilmington-area nonprofit organizations, are participating in workshops and programs on Board Governance: Intentional Structures and Processes run by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington's Department of Public & International Affairs. This program is an informative, structured approach to operations, organization, and most of all strategic planning.

At last night's Board of Directors meeting we focused on marketing. Several volunteer member of the NBCC Marketing Committee made presentations and discussed our 90-day plan for upgrading our website and Internet-based information access and delivery. In the photo below committee members Steve Bon, Bob Jenkins, and Greg Norris presented website design and access concepts.

Local jingle writer Dean Powell (of interplanetary fame, BTW) played a song he wrote and produced for use as a radio commercial (complete with unidentified Chamber luminary voice-overs) and talked about the impact of a jingles and songs. (He never did get into the stickiness of echoic storage, but that's why songs stick in our heads, and why they work - stimulus we hear persists much much longer than stimulus we see (aka "iconic storage"), which further explains why you can remember a song quicker than a logo.)

In the photo below the ever-dapper Dean Powell (you can tell he's a friend, right?) made an animated point to the assemblage.

When the marketing committee finished their presentations, the board conducted a regular meeting. Much is going on this year and we're all excited and trying to stay focused in this sugar-laden holiday season. Below NBCC Board members Earline Kroll and Connie Reeves discussed on-going projects.

Laura Patterson and Tony Vlach talked about the upcoming NBCC Christmas Party (it's on December 18th at the Magnolia Greens Golf Course club house, y'all - call 910-383-0553 for details and tickets!) while in the background Dean Powell got an early start on the next agenda item.

Just in case you wonder if we got away with consuming delectable dietary delicacies . . . nope, we didn't. We lined up for massive quantities of carbohydrates, mostly in the form of simple sugar Christmas desserts, though in truth someone snuck in some protein, which also rapidly disappeared.

So we conducted business, we listened and watched some presentations (we'll remember what we heard longer than what we saw, correct?) and we ate. I'd call that a good meeting - what about you?

Comfort Suites Hotel Building Update

Work is proceeding with great haste on the Comfort Suites Hotel next to the Leland office of Coldwell Banker Sea Coast Realty. We even saw people working on the roof on Thanksgiving morning and they generally start at daybreak and continue until dusk.


The 106-room Comfort Suites Hotel, the first to be completed of four planned hotels within two mile stretch on Route 17 in Leland, is scheduled to open in May 2009, so that timing is certainly driving the work.

This is just one more sign that northern Brunswick County is continuing to develop at a rapid pace, in contrast to much of the country where commercial development has slowed significantly.

Financial Crisis = Great Opportunities!

The financial markets are in turmoil. That much is pretty clear and until the U.S. federal goverment decides what it will (or won't) do about it, the financial industry is on hold. Many consumers and investors are waiting, too, waiting for the government to decide so the financial folks can react, and then eventually, either immediately or after a while, business can resume at a more normal pace.

But in the mean time . . . . what are the really smart money people doing?

I don't think the savviest investors are sitting around wringing their hands waiting for Big Brother and all the younger Cousins to decide what the financial world is going to be like for them. The smart money is already making moves. Did you notice Warren Buffett invested $5 Billion dollars last week in a financial institution. No one on the planet has reason to think Warren Buffett is anything but probably one of if not the savviest investor alive. So he made a bold move.

How about you? Maybe you don't have $5 Billion to invest, maybe you don't have $5, 000 to put into personal or investment real estate today, but you can take positive action, you can be getting ready to move as soon as possible. This is clearly a time when those who wait will get the crumbs, those who can and do act right now will get the biggest pieces of the cake, and those who get ready to act as soon as they can will still get nice-sized slices. So how about you?