6. Hank Dickenson - Denton Chamber of Commerce

Justin Shelley: Welcome everybody to episode six of DFW Rockstars. I am here today with Hank Dickenson. Hank, say hi. Hi. That was deep. I don't even know where to go from that. Hank Dickenson: The whole Rockstars thing has me off my I've always wanted to be one, but I don't Justin Shelley: And now you are. Qualify. Yeah. Well, now you are. So, you know what? Let's, we'll dig into that. The the title has thrown people off because my first guest on the show was a musician. And then my second guest was not. And people were saying, hey, what's going on here? Well, rockstars, that's just in my mind, that's just somebody. Hank Dickenson: Got a bait and switch there. Justin Shelley: A little bit. Yeah. So I kinda felt bad. Hank Dickenson: They'll be very upset to see me here today. Justin Shelley: You're not a rockstar? You don't sing, you don't play? Hank Dickenson: You know, in the car, yeah, I mean, in my mind, I'm still pretty good, Justin Shelley: but no. You and me both, you and me both. So yeah, I mean, really the kind of the catalyst for this whole thing was looking to connect with other community leaders, business leaders, just people who have been around the block and can help out a little bit. And it's evolved a little bit, but the premise really is that business just sucks. We get into this, I've owned this business, well, twice now, because the first time it didn't quite make the cut. The statistic that I hate, by the way, before I say that, you work at the chamber, you talk to a lot of businesses, you're kind of in the world. What are the statistics of success in business? And I'm leaving that intentionally open. Now? Yeah, like if I start a business, how likely am I to succeed? Hank Dickenson: You know, I wish I knew the answer to that question now because Justin Shelley: Pre pandemic, does it help? Hank Dickenson: I guess, I mean, I would like to think you're talking 60% with the right backing and the right focus. But now it's so hard to say because I've heard so many stories that are, I wouldn't say shocking, but just downright disappointing. People who had dreams and had planned and had done all the right things for a business model that they thought was going to work and now gone. Yeah. Could come back, but not right away. So do the dreams fade? And do you move on to something else? And then, there are success stories during the pandemic. Absolutely. Yeah, to throw a percentage out, I wish I could throw one out that was scientific. Justin Shelley: I don't know that any of them are. Hank Dickenson: I think right now getting anything to stick to the wall is a totally different proposition than it was True. You know, a year and a half. Justin Shelley: Well, so for fun, let's exclude the pandemic and let's just talk about what you've seen up to. Hank Dickenson: Well, this community, and when you say been around the block, I have been around the block, but it's been around the block in Denton since '19 This 90 community has changed so much. And I believe it's predicated by the growth of UNT and the growth of TWU. And the fact that more and more young people were electing to stay here on the weekends, stay here in the evenings, needed jobs here, got tired of fighting I-thirty five. Because the commuter aspect of both UNT and TWU is gone. I mean, you've got almost 40,000 enrollment at North Texas and it'll it'll get back to feeling like that in the fall, hopefully. Texas Woman's University has done a wonderful job of rebounding and rebuilding and revitalizing. And so they're dumping a lot of young talent into the market. Then you have NCTC. Back in the early 90s, I mean, you could get out on the highway and if you wanted to go out to eat, it was the Outback Steakhouse and that was it. And that's the truth. Yeah. You know? And the downtown square, you could literally, you know, put a, you know, tumbleweed and and watch it bounce through it. It wasn't gonna hit anybody. Justin Shelley: And now you can't even park. Hank Dickenson: Well, well, you can. Gotta park. Gotta We'll get into the parking walking problem. Okay. Okay. But the difference is it's vibrant. Pandemic notwithstanding, it's become a recruitable asset for both universities. And I see that as one of the big changes. Now with that has come, I think a preponderance of probably too many rental opportunities, as opposed to homes. As I always say Justin Shelley: Meaning it's hard to find a home to buy. Hank Dickenson: Yeah, I think you know, you don't have a lot of new higher end homes going in. So you're not going to really recruit to that market. Okay, okay. A home is something you take care of. A rental property is something you don't really take care of. So I'd like to see the equilibrium there kind of flash out. Justin Shelley: Yeah. Because most new construction is apartment buildings. Hank Dickenson: Boy, there's a lot of it. You know? And people smarter than me are gonna tell you whether or not we can survive that. To me, it looks like a glut. It looks like too many. And they look great right now, we've all They Justin Shelley: do now. Hank Dickenson: Yeah, the longer you've been couple years. They don't they don't always hold up because the people don't hold them up like they do at home. Correct. Anyway, I see those as big, big differences. And a lot of that comes through my lens of twenty five plus years of working in the athletic department at UNT where we were focused on trying to market teams to students and faculty and staff. Justin Shelley: I don't know that I knew that about you. So tell me what you did at UNT. Hank Dickenson: A lot of different titles through the years, but associate athletic director. And then a lot of what I focused on was external work with corporate fundraising, selling advertising, and then as an offshoot broadcasting games. So there was a lot of tie in with sponsorship activity, which is why I got involved with the chamber years ago, was to create that business portfolio. And that was one of the reasons when I did retire from full time work in athletics, I wanted some job that would get me back and connected. And this one has been to this point anyway, for me, I hope it's been ideal for the chamber and for the business community. Everything I wanted is kind of what's happening. But yeah, I hope that ties a lot of it together and why I look at the city the way I look at it. Justin Shelley: Right, that's a whole lot of stuff I didn't know about Denton. I'm a transplant. And my experience here has been strictly in the IT business world. So I've been involved a little bit in the community, but I think when you and I first met, I confessed that my involvement is almost zero lately. And I'm trying to correct my ways there. Hank Dickenson: Good time. I mean, good time for that rebirth. We, you know, we'll talk more about chamber and what the chamber really means. But the one thing most people are unified with it is the networking aspect and couldn't do that during a pandemic. Didn't need to do it, shouldn't have done it. We were, as a Denton Chamber of Commerce, I think, smart, safe, conservative. Some other chambers got out there a lot quicker and started doing the in persons we didn't, out of respect for the entire membership. But it's starting to loosen up now. We've had some really good events in the last three weeks, we've had some really great events, and we're still sporting the mask and trying to respect the six feet distance. But we're seeing more and more people obviously that have gotten their shots or had COVID that are a lot more comfortable getting out and those that are waiting, we're ready for you when you're ready for us. Justin Shelley: I fall into one of those two camps and I did not get the shot. Hank Dickenson: Oh, sorry. How bad was it? Justin Shelley: You know, I can't say it wasn't, but when you put it in comparison to people who were on ventilators, who died, I almost make light of it because it was not a big deal other than it was very uncomfortable, somewhat painful, it was scary. The biggest difference, because you'll hear people say it's kind of like the flu, and I would agree and disagree at the same time. There were some very, very stark differences between the flu and COVID. And the main one for me was that I would get some, I would call it a lung seizure, I don't really know what it was, but when I would try to breathe in past, you know, if you feel your lungs to say 10%, I was fine. But if I would try to take a deeper breath than that, my lungs would just, well, they would just convulse. It was weird. Honestly, I couldn't explain it better than that. And that and the smell thing, so to this day, I still can't smell completely. Some types of smells have come back, others have not, which is weird. Hank Dickenson: Yeah, I've never I've had some some olfactory issues in the past with a with like a concussion, which can happen. So I understand how that can happen. But the whole loss of taste and all the other things, I never experienced any of that. Now I think both my boys are college age and living at the house right now until all this kind of settles. And we're pretty sure I'm sure the oldest had it in February, we just didn't know what it was. And then as we started learning more like, that's why you were in bed for three straight days and looked like you had bronchitis. But in my dealings with UNT before I retired, still traveling with the football team, and even though we played seven home games and only traveled three times, we were getting tested three times a week at a minimum. And I talked to my good friend Jeff Smith, who's the head trainer at North Texas. He estimated well over 20,000 tests were given to the student athletes and those people deemed essential. Right. So I was very lucky through the whole deal. I could look you in the eye and say, I've tested three times this week, and I've been negative every time. I did get quarantined at one point on a contact trace with another staff member who he and I were working on a project similar to what you and I are doing. We were in close quarters, doing some production work, and he tested positive turned out to be a false positive. But we still ended up at home based on the quarantine policy. And I'll give UNT a lot of credit. I think they handled it masterfully, not just the athletic department, certainly the athletic department, but just the university as a whole. Nice job. Justin Shelley: And I would piggyback on that and say, Man, this was just such a difficult thing to deal with from however you chose to do it, you are taking a wild guess at it. I got a letter in the mail from the city of Denton telling me, the owner of an IT company, to develop a healthcare policy. And I'm just like, are you kidding me right now? I am not a doctor. Nobody knows about this thing and so it kind of becomes a multi layered CYA project. And I don't know that I would sit here and what do they call it? Armchair quarterback or Monday morning quarterback. I don't think I would criticize anybody for how they handled it. I think people operated on some level of fear mixed with some level of information and a whole lot of misinformation. Right? I mean, is that kind of fair? Hank Dickenson: Well, yeah. No, I think it's extremely fair. And then throw in the different political sides on it, which made it very, very difficult because then if that bothered you, you were worried about what the other person thought about how you handle it. So if you're representing an organization or I just look at athletics professional in college together and how they tried to create the the safe holds that could as long as you're gonna get on a plane and travel with a team, you're getting on a plane and traveling with a bunch of young people. So you're throwing caution to the wind at some level. Correct. You put everything in place that you can, you test, you wear the mask, you wear the gloves, you do all that you can, but you're still not sure early in this thing if that's what you should be doing. Luckily, you didn't have to do it very often. Yeah. Justin Shelley: Now, was no I don't know that there was a right answer or a wrong answer, and I ache for people. I had to decide for a handful of people in this building, but people had to make decisions for large groups. You can't win. No matter what you do, somebody's mad. Hank Dickenson: Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I hope you know, I think that's the way the chamber looked at it. If a percentage of your membership, which is already struggling as small businesses is mad at you, that's not good. So let's just slow roll it. Thankfully, the Denton Chamber has done that. But back to where we started here, I do feel like people keep talking about the new norm. I know if the new norm has arrived, but something better than what we've been dealing with has and we're very anxious to see people again and and press flesh, you wanna shake hands. Justin Shelley: Want Absolutely. Hank Dickenson: You wanna pat on the back, if not a full on hug. You wanna Justin Shelley: Yep. Hank Dickenson: You wanna see people you haven't seen in a year. It's true. With all Justin Shelley: of the struggles, and there have been a lot of them through COVID. For me, the biggest one was that, the lack of human connection. Because regardless of how you want to act through this thing, you didn't really have the right to have human connection with people. Hank Dickenson: Yeah. I think conversely though, some families would tell you that they got better family time than Justin Shelley: they Hank Dickenson: ever would have. I know we fall into that category between kids, grandkids, everything that we were able to kind of lasso in, we had some terrific family time that I don't think we were gonna get otherwise. Justin Shelley: Yeah. No. There's truth to that. Yeah. So A lot has come out of it, good and bad. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And at this point, it is what it is. You just you you it's there, we move on. And where we started this, we were talking about the, not the damage, we're talking about the likelihood of business to succeed. If I start a business, how likely is it that I'm gonna make it? Depending on the industry, COVID either helped or in a lot of cases did some damage. Hank Dickenson: Right, and then some industries that are historically difficult to succeed at like the restaurant and bar industry, they were put on hold. So now what is already a hard thing to get a loan for is even more difficult. And yet we're all really anxious to be able to go out to eat, go out to a tavern or a place that we used to watch live music. So we're clamoring for those things, but those are people that we really have to help get back. And if you're a town like this, where we claim to be a music town, we've got a lot of great musicians here in live venues. You got to be ready to pay the cover, you got to be ready to come back and help these people get off their feet and say, I've missed you, but I've missed you to the point where I'm gonna pay to see you. Don't be cheap in that regard. Justin Shelley: I could not agree more. Hank Dickenson: That's a big message in this town. If we're gonna call ourselves a music town, let's support music. Let's support the arts. And that means you're gonna have to pay a little bit of money to appreciate what is in your own backyard. Justin Shelley: I am so glad you said that. Hank Dickenson: Not a lot of money, by the way, but a little bit more than Justin Shelley: what we're Yeah. Doing I love that you said that. I ache for both the musicians that are out there largely unemployed unless they've been able to pivot and the venues that you know, there's a lot of money not being made right now. Hank Dickenson: Yeah, got a lot of friends tied up in all of that here and I admire their grit through all this, but the bottom line is it's not gonna get better for them unless they can start playing catch up and it's gonna mean confidence in the venues, confidence in the climate out there, but also again, you know, real support. Justin Shelley: Right, right. Well, hopefully that happens. Hopefully that happens. Well, listen, let's kind of get to some of the meat here. One of the things I love to ask my guests and I do this, let me get the question in first and I'm gonna talk about why. The question is, what is something that you've faced, a challenge you faced in your personal life that you've worked through it, you hit it head on and you came out a better person for it. And the reason I like to ask these kinds of questions is because I grew up with a lot of my own challenges, some insecurities, whatever. And I would look at people who have done well with their lives and I think, wow, they didn't have to struggle. And so I really like just pointing out that we're all human. We all have a road to travel. There is not a straight line from ignorance to brilliance and success. But wherever we fall on that journey, there's ups and downs and highs and lows. So Hank, what is something that you've had to deal with in your life that just made you up your game? Hank Dickenson: Yeah, I think it was a big process, but an only child and lost my dad to cancer back in 2013. But it was one of those really rough landings where you had to come to grips while it was happening. I think, through that process, I look back and there's a lot of things I wish I'd done better or had handled differently. But I do feel like somewhere in the middle of all that when I was trying to come to grips with the finality, just kind of the faith based part of life that should have hit me in the head a long time ago, for me personally, and I'm absolutely a work in progress in that regard. Anybody that knows me would tell you that. But I think I'm a work in progress now. I'm not sure I was a work in anything going into that. So painful loss, my mom still got great health and has done really well, despite his passing, but it's just it's a anyone that's lost a parent I know knows this, it is a game changer in terms of who you thought you were and who you really are. And so I think some good things came out of that for me in terms of focus and refocus in terms of what's important to me. Now, raising kids, there have been plenty of other personal fun things to deal with, but that wouldn't change the way I approached everything else. Justin Shelley: It does. And there's just something about tragedy that does that to you. You get crystal clear on what's important. I think, so I don't remember if I told you guys this earlier, but my son was killed in a motorcycle accident last February. Got to a place, I'm here, I'm trying to run a business, now we've got the pandemic hitting, and I mean, life's just chaos. And so with limited emotional capacity and energy in general, you have to get very clear on what it is that's important to do. And you've gotta do those things well because you may not have the energy to do the other stuff that you were doing. So, yeah, that's kind of what I hear you saying and correct me if that's wrong, but it's just kind of like a clarity. Hank Dickenson: Well, think, you know, when you sent me the questions and I thought about that, that is the initial. It's the biggest thing that's changed my axis and not only just the pain, but just having to watch something you couldn't stop and having to come to terms with that. Luckily, And we had a great relationship. So I'm not like some people that had regrets there. Just looking back on it, I probably was a lot more concerned about me and not as concerned about everything else. But I found a way to kind of filter out the right end of that before it was all done. And you know, it takes you a while, that's not just done when someone passes away as you well know, there's a long trail after that that may never come to a complete finite end. Justin Shelley: Right, probably not. Would guess not. And I talked about the challenge for me during COVID was the human connection part of it. This is mostly why, but also I think that we're just wired for that. And we, the people that are closest to us, when we lose them, it's a piece of us is actually gone. It's not just a change, it's not just a, you know, I can move from one city to another and it's new, it's different and maybe there's some clarity and some things I have to change in my life, but a piece of you isn't gone. Hank Dickenson: Yeah, it's a chunk, you know, it's not an injury that you end up with a scar. It's a chunk that's not coming back. Right. Yeah, and sometimes can be a bigger chunk with some things than others. But, you know, it's inevitable. Justin Shelley: Oh, it is. Hank Dickenson: One out of every one people die. You've got to make some choices about how you're gonna live. Justin Shelley: Brutal reality. Hank Dickenson: And I could probably make a lot better choices, but hopefully I've started to do some of that. Justin Shelley: Yeah. That's a heavy one, man. All right, so let's move on to the business slash professional life. You've, again, I didn't know about your background in sports. So we may have to do some talking offline there, but in your professional career, what was something, and it could be multiple things, but is there one pivotal moment that cause I mean, what you just described in the personal life, that's pivotal. Now, do you have something that's also pivotal in the professional world? Hank Dickenson: I think, you know, when you choose an industry to be and college athletics was the industry I chose to be in, I think the pivotal moment was towards the end of the career where I realized, okay, some of the goals I'd set out for aren't going to happen. There's a lot of reasons why maybe some of it is my failure to be good across the board at everything it takes to be an athletic director or maybe it's because other forces are conspiring to make sure that doesn't happen. But when there was change within the leadership, I was retained, but I had worked for a long time as a high ranking associate AD and then the old book, Someone Move My Cheese, and cheese got moved. And it's not a lot of fun when you're in your 50s and you've been at a place for a long time and you've got a little bit a brand in the community because you've worked so long with so many people. So that was challenging. I go back to question one, and I was able to make it through that and start to just realize, the big thing now is to be humble and know that you've gotten an awful lot in life. So if the whole career thing doesn't end up exactly the way you maybe had targeted it for twenty or thirty years, you got to get over yourself and reinvent yourself. And I think the pandemic allowed me to sit there and say, you know what, there's other things I could do. This has been a blast. I've loved working in athletics. I worked for three different universities. But most of my career right here in Denton, that was my choice. I had a couple opportunities to go elsewhere, but always just felt like this was home, great place to raise kids. My wife had a job she loved, we loved the friends we have here. So I'm still luckily broadcasting games for North Texas and doing a little bit of part time work on the side for the athletic department to keep my foot in the door. But I went ahead and took my pension and jumped into this chamber job, which isn't a big jump for me. It's back to working with a lot of the same business people I worked with for years. But that was a challenge to kind of negotiate the change and realize the role had changed and it wasn't going to go back to what it was before and not a lot of fun early on. But you know, you fight through things sometimes to get to a point where you know it's good for your family. And then once you get there, say all right, time to set sail. So hope that answers it. Justin Shelley: No, it does. Hank Dickenson: And no harm, no foul on anyone's part. It's change and it's decisions that you make put you in a position where sometimes you're to gonna make a pivot around the change if you don't like the change. Justin Shelley: And that's the thing. So I think as humans, we're wired to resist change. I don't know why that is, but it just seems to be some change we like, some change we work for, we want it to happen, but it's only something we have control over, where there's a victory in the end. But when things change on us without our input, we're kind of wired to resist that, I think. Hank Dickenson: Yeah, and I think sentimentality is a real, I used to think it was a nice quality. Think it's one you better be real careful with because if you're too sentimental about things, it's going to come back to bite you in the butt. And that's happened to me before because I tend to get I like process and protocols and things that I know I can count on. And I guess we all do but the older I get I realize how many curveballs I have not even swung at because I just didn't want to have to learn. And now when you deal with younger people all the time, I do, especially people in your field, IT, I'm overwhelmed, I need help all the time. And so I try to be very nice. Justin Shelley: Yeah, there's a few people you wanna be nice to, the janitors, the finance people and the IT people. No doubt. Shameless self promote or plug there. So, you said something, I wish I could remember exactly your words. I'm old and my brain is not there anymore. My memory's going. But you said something that I wanted to talk about just briefly, as things got thrown at me that I didn't want, maybe it's a sentimentality, but I lost, I've been in IT originally in 1997, I got into the business and things were really good for the first few years. And then nineeleven happened. And to keep the story short, I'll just say that I walked away from the business. You could argue that I lost it, but it was actually my immaturity that caused that to happen. I was a young, in my mid late 20s maybe. But when those towers came down, it caused a domino effect that cost me my business. And that was a very, very painful experience. What I learned from that over time was that I walked away because I used to say I lost my business. I used to say the economy turned, it got political, whatever. But as I got a little bit older, I won't say wiser, more experienced maybe, I realized that I did that to myself. And so when you're talking about this change that you had to maybe let go of some expectations, the sentimentality of it, Here we sit in another life altering situation with the pandemic and I'm still here. It has not been easy. And there have been plenty of times where I wish I could walk away or I wanted to walk away or be easier to walk away like I did when I was in my 20s. But sticking it out can be challenging and rewarding. Coming back to my original kind of question about business and why, so the statistic I was kind of digging and you never went there, so I'm gonna do it myself. There's so many, I've heard a lot, all statistics are made up, I'm sure you've heard that quote, including this 97% of statistics are I've made up, this heard two that stick in my head. One was that twenty percent of businesses will fail within the first five years, and of those, I'm sorry, eighty percent will fail, twenty will succeed. And of those that succeed in the next five years, eighty percent will fail again. So we're down to a pretty small number that make it ten years. Now, I did some research, I was trying to validate that claim, and I came upon one that's probably more realistic, which is only one third, one out of three businesses will make it to the ten year mark. Wow. So if we just go with that, it's still the odds are not in your favor in the business world. Whatever statistic you use, when you talk to people that own a business, this is not the American dream that they thought they were getting into in most cases. I'm a member of a community of IT consultants, specifically for marketing, but we just kind of talk, whoops, I hit my microphone. We talk about the challenges of everything in the business world and a lot of people in this community are not happy and they're not having wild success. It's just rough. So, again, that's kind of why I do this podcast because as much as I like technology, I really like the concept of business. I like learning from other people's mistake, like learning from my own mistakes. But with that background, as you're involved in some extent with a lot of businesses in this community, and I can tell that you love this community, by the way, I love that as you're talking about Denton and how involved you've been. What do you see in the business community that maybe concerns you? Hank Dickenson: Well, I think we're all concerned about just the confidence and then the numbers you just brought out. You know, can we get confidence levels back up to where an investment, for instance, in the chamber is something people will consider because right now, that may be the furthest thing from their mind, even if you talk about, hey, at certain levels, it's only going to cost you $35 a month to be a member and be in the directory and blah, blah, blah. Well, guess what? That's a lot of money for some people right now. 35 a month, the margins have shrunk to the point where, A, the economy's got to get better, that's going to take time and B, the confidence level, the ability and people have, we need the thesaurus because I don't want to use the word pivot one more time, but people have to a whole different paradigm in terms of how they approach business. And it may be just a simple example of going virtual rather than going into an office. But that changes the way the business climate flows, that changes what we were used to doing to connect people. And it allows some people who didn't want a whole lot of connectivity to now enjoy the fact they don't have to experience So again, I think if I had to look at across the board, what I'm looking for when I go to meet with a prospective new member is, do you have some confidence in the business climate, in your business, and what I'm pitching you? Because we need all three of those to line up. Interesting. Then we can talk about just the different things that maybe make sense for joining the chamber right now. It's a great time to enjoy, I think, a rebirth of membership team. We have lost some I always say it sounds awful, but we scraped off some dead skin. Yeah. We're growing new skin. Yeah. And we probably aren't going to get the dead skin back real quick, or it may morph into a different business before it comes back. I may end up talking to you again, but you may be doing something just slightly different before we get you back and involved in helping the membership out. And that's the other thing you gotta think about with a chamber membership, it should benefit the chamber member, but they have to understand how it benefits the chamber. Justin Shelley: And that is why you and I are sitting in this room today. I'm gonna jump in right now and say it's, what do they call Hank Dickenson: it, Chamber 101? Chamber 101. Justin Shelley: Got an Well, you know what, it got my attention. Whoever came up with it, it worked, because I saw that and I was like, yeah, I've been meaning to get more involved in the community, always from a selfish perspective. But I wanted to join the chamber and start going to events and whatever for me. And I saw that email, it seemed non threatening, hey, this is just educational, I'm gonna learn some of the things about the chamber, I'm already interested, no pressure, let's do this. And so I jump on the Zoom meeting, because it's all virtual, as you pointed out, And it was like a four to one ratio if I remember. Hank Dickenson: Yes, private school. Justin Shelley: It was like Hank Dickenson: a private school. Well, funny thing, and she's now moved back to Abilene, but Erica Pengburn, our president, got to give her all the credit. I mean, 100% of the credit. She came up with the Chamber 101, the entire flow of that presentation. She's the one that put it together. And she had a dreadful day that day, she was coming from oral surgery. So we looked at, we're normally looking at five to six members or prospective members that jump on a chamber 101. And so it's Shana Thomas, Kendall Carlson, myself and Erica. And Shana and Kendall are gonna speak to their roles within the chamber and Kendall does a great job with all of our marketing and Shana puts together a lot of membership driven events and sponsorships so that I'm supposed to come in and talk about just membership. But Erica talks about the overarching history of the chamber, what the chamber is about, and what your membership means. So she could have easily that day said, just call the guy back, call Justin Shelley and tell him we're we're not doing it today. Justin Shelley: There's only one guy here. Hank Dickenson: And she's like, no, let's go. If he's on, we're off. And it it was a great lesson in fortitude on her part. Absolutely. But it also got you, I think, probably at a level that we didn't anticipate and maybe you didn't go in because you learned some things that Yeah. You liked. Yeah. So that's a great Chamber story. Justin Shelley: Well, then let me talk to that. So when I when I first of all, when I went onto this Zoom meeting, I had no expectations of joining on the spot. That wasn't my intention. I just was, it's Chamber one hundred one, this is a class, I'm gonna learn something, which I did. But if I was to join, the first thing I do historically, the first thing I did in joining chambers is look at the price sheet and find out what is the cheapest way I can be involved in their networking meetings. It was based on employee count before and I think you guys have changed that model. Hank Dickenson: We have, it a pure model that was an industry standard that was based on numbers of employees. But Erica went in and redid all of the packages so that I like to say, the phrase I use is more meat on the bone. More you tend to invest, the more opportunities you have for exposure driven elements. But depending on what your size is, you may elect for our lowest rung, which is micro enterprise at $350 a year and it does get you the basics. Gets you in front of the membership, it gets you some entree that you're not going to have unless you're a chamber member. Next up is five fifty Business Builder and you start to add different benefits to it. So again, those are kind of the starters and we figured you'd be right in there in one of those two levels. Justin Shelley: Well, a couple of points here. That was a brilliant strategy that she did because I didn't feel like I was being told what I had to pay. I felt like I got to choose. That was key. And then the other part that was key in that presentation was, was it her or you? One of you guys said, hey, yeah that's great we have networking but let's talk about how this benefits a community. And I'm admitting my own ignorance here or selfishness and that's me judging myself because I did when I heard that I was like, oh damn, I'm only thinking about me. And you made that, mean you nailed it when you said you've gotta have confidence in your business, your industry I think you said and then but the community. And I'm probably slaughtering that but it's more than just what is this gonna do for me directly because I can't grow my business in a dead economy. Right. And that hit home to me. I love business in general. I love Denton, I love Texas, I love the area that I'm in, I like the people that I interface with. So that was just one of those pivotal, I'm gonna use your word, pivotal moments for me as far as supporting the chamber goes. It was less now about how is the chamber gonna benefit me, but it became about how can I help this group who is trying to help the community? Hank Dickenson: Yeah, and so some of us remember these at our grandmother's house, a three legged stool, you don't see that Oh yeah, much in oh yeah. But the chamber Justin Shelley: It's because they tip over. Hank Dickenson: Well, they can. Gotta have the legs in place. So yeah, let's not Justin Shelley: use I ruined your analogy. I'm sorry. Hank Dickenson: Well, well, you tarnished it a little bit though. But if you look at the Chamber of Commerce in Denton, it is the three legged stool that the members sit on, the first leg is the Chamber of Commerce. Yeah. We are allowing businesses to network. We're allowing them to take advantage of resources. We're allowing them to get together if that's what they need to do to help sell their wares to one. Justin Shelley: Which is important. And I don't want to diminish that Yeah. Side of Hank Dickenson: And that's probably the first thing anyone thinks of when they think of the chamber. Okay. And that's a very big vital part of Justin Shelley: it. It is. Hank Dickenson: Well, now let's move over to Discover Denton, which is the good old convention and visitor bureau aspect of our chamber. What are those folks doing every day? They are marketing Denton to outsiders, and people sometimes scoff at the idea that we've got tourism in Denton. Well, let me tell you before the pandemic, thanks to the convention center here, we were bringing in tons of people every weekend. We were bringing in people who would come here, shop, eat, gas up, dine, and leave it all behind. And that money goes into your hotel occupancy tax fund, which benefits the city and so many things that we like as citizens to take advantage of. It's going to take a year or two to bounce back in that hot tax fund, but that's what they're doing every day. Your membership in the chamber is enabling us to have a budget to go out and do that If at a high that goes away, you feel it, you feel it in terms of entertainment for your kids, for things that are happening in town that you want to take advantage of, for things that make this a great community. So that's a part of what your chamber membership funds. And then there's economic development. And that is, if tourism is about heads in beds, hotels, then ED is really about heads under roofs. It's about bringing employees here that help the tax base, but form our community. Everybody, every business needs people to support their business. So the chamber is trying to bring the right industry that brings the right people with the right skill set, and all of that spills over to say we've got a healthy business climate. You may only want the ribbon cutting at the beginning of your chamber experience and pay the minimal fee and get out after a year. People do that. Yeah. But I think if you're really in it for the long haul, you're gonna understand where there's a lot more going on every day behind the scenes. I have an obligation at some level to help support this, and then I can take advantage of that in a nutshell is kind of what I think we told you that day. And I've tried to use that elevator speech everywhere I go because I firmly believe in all the points. Justin Shelley: And it's solid. It was, like I said, it was kind of a paradigm shift for me from what can this I almost hate to say that, but it was, it was what can the chamber do for me to, okay, what can I do for the chamber? And not that I've even been great at it yet, but when I first joined several years ago, I did it again with what can it do for me? Well, I'm gonna have to get out there. I became a chamber ambassador for a very short time. I went to the ribbon cuttings with the little name tag on. I felt so important and awesome at the, you know, and then within a short period of time, my schedule got busy. I'm thinking to myself, okay, is this really helping my business? And I just kind of fell away and didn't come back for a few years. And so when I came back again, it was kind of with that same intention. Okay, this time I'm really gonna commit and I'm really gonna make this work for me. And I can tell you right now that I have no intentions of ever dropping my membership with the chamber, regardless of what it does directly for me. And I would just say to the listening audience that, and I love that you said that you have to have confidence in the community, the business community, if you're gonna have confidence in your own business. So it is about us individually, it has to be. We have to be profitable, we have to grow our businesses, we have to do all of those things, but to, I mean, you can be selfless while being selfish at the same time. Hank Dickenson: Absolutely. And again, we should toast Erica because another part of the effectiveness of the membership tiers that she put together is even though the pandemic swept away some small business and it did in every chamber, we're not unique there. Businesses went away. Right. Okay. It wasn't that they were dissatisfied with with the chamber. They they Justin Shelley: lost business. For jobs. Hank Dickenson: But even though membership has gone down and needs to rebound, and that's a part of my daily focus. Justin Shelley: Yep. Hank Dickenson: Revenues are up because those packages allowed for more investment at smarter levels to the Really, your revenues are up with a lower membership. Justin Shelley: That's like the holy grail of business Well, right Hank Dickenson: and again Justin Shelley: I love that. Hank Dickenson: Very practical way of doing things. And then, you know, it was funny when we talked about this job, and this is, know, quote unquote, my retirement job. So it's not the highest paid thing I've ever done or anything like that. It's really fun. But I'm the first full time membership director in one hundred and eleven years of the Denton Chamber. Really? So just to have anybody, even someone as dumb as me out there every day knocking on doors is something over and above what was happening. To that point, Pam Marufo, who's our interim president and longtime Vice President for administration for the chamber. Pam is really the brains, she's run the whole fiscal operation for the last thirteen years. I took her out over across the highway to what I call the industrial sector of town where Denton Enterprise Airport is, where Peterbilt's located, where all of the major employers and industry is. And we just talked about all of the untapped business that needs to hear what you and I just talked about. Are they gonna join? Do we have to have wild thoughts of how much money they can give us? No, it's just a knock on the door, get in front of some people and talk about everything you and I just said because it hasn't happened. And if it happens, what happens if we start getting some new blood, some new skin from a very important part of our market that most people in Denton either aren't aware of or just don't they don't come in contact with it. So they don't worry a whole lot about it. There's a lot of manufacturing going on in our town and some really quality employers that all tend to lead on one another. Peterbilt's a huge example of the chamber victory back in the day. To lure Peterbilt and have their operations here has not only meant that we're producing quality trucks every day out of Denton, but all the other side businesses that have to come along to help them build those trucks. So some of those are the stories we wanna start sharing with people, and and that'll help that business climate confidence. Justin Shelley: Right. Well, you know, we've I think we've been over all the questions that I have, and I know you've got another Hank Dickenson: No. We got another five minutes. So before I roll on the next one, I've stumped you. If I've completely vacated everything you had, then Justin Shelley: No. I I just kinda wanna maybe it's a key takeaway and maybe it's just something personal again, but where you said membership was down, but revenues are up. That is, have you ever heard of the book Pumpkin Plan? No. Okay, Mike Michalowicz, little plug for him. But it's just the concept of taking, getting, in the book, it's a deliberate process of getting rid of your low paying clients that are maybe a pain in the neck, but you're not making a lot of money from them, and getting more revenue from better clients. And therefore less pain, less anguish, you know, you're not cringing when the phone rings. And so I love that you said that, even though I don't love that revenue's down because businesses went out. So it's kind of a double edged sword there. But maybe, you know, because I love to talk about business and how do you grow, how do you survive, how do you thrive, maybe that's a lesson learned for all of us. Take a deep look at where your money's coming from, that eightytwenty rule comes to mind. 20% of your revenue come, or how is 80% of your revenue comes from your best 20% of your clients? It kind of sounds like that's what unintentionally you guys ended up with. Hank Dickenson: Yeah, again, raising two boys, they get tired of my favorite word, but it's efficiency. Can we make a decision that's that's efficient? That's everything you just said, creates efficiency, which in an optimum situation means everything flows better, everything is more purposeful and result oriented and you waste a lot of time, sometimes trying to appease the lowest hanging fruit. I know from my career in athletics, and this is true, you would spend as much time trying to satisfy the business that bought the $200 game program ad as you did the naming right sponsor on the side of the Well, one really requires the time? Which one when it comes to renewal time is really gonna make or break your job? And yet, you sometimes get caught up in that that low hanging fruit. And you just have to start saying, well, are we offering some things that really aren't that productive? Let's let's notch everything up a level, and let's still create a low level for people to gain entree. But maybe we make it just a little bit harder to grasp so that there's more value in it. Justin Shelley: Right, exactly. More value. I like that. Know what? I think that's a good place to kind of wrap things up. So, you know, as painful as challenges are, in the end, it generally seems that when we are forced to really get serious about life, we get good at it. And so I hate the pandemic. I hate everything about it except that, you know what, we're forced to take a deep look, maybe clean house a little bit, and hopefully come out of this thing better on the other side. Hank Dickenson: Yeah. One thing I learned working with college athletic teams is you couldn't always control how the season was gonna go as an administrator, but if you worked really hard during the tough seasons, it made your work easier during the enjoyable good seasons. And I think we're coming out of an undeniably tough season. Yeah. But I think we're getting ready for some good seasons. And I think the people that kept their focus, kept working hard, and maybe made the changes they needed to, they're gonna have a good couple years coming up soon. Justin Shelley: I agree. 100%. I agree on that. On that note, Hank, thank you for being here. Really, really do appreciate it. We'll Hank Dickenson: talk sports next time. Justin Shelley: We'll we'll okay. Deal. We'll do it. Alright, guys. Take care. We'll see you next time.