Marc Truby has moved from selling memberships at Millwood Golf & Racquet Club to selling a city. The executive director of the Nixa Area Chamber of Commerce, a Chicago-area native who has a bachelor’s in business management from Missouri State University, succeeded 10-year director Sharon Whitehill Gray, who retired, Oct. 15. One month in, he has been busy networking and planning events to promote Nixa-area businesses and increase chamber memberships. His goal in 2013 is to increase its 500 members by 5 percent and help drop a commercial vacancy rate of nearly 30 percent.
Chicago to Millwood “I grew up in the Chicagoland area for 21 years, and my big move came when I transferred to Missouri State. I graduated there in 2005, and I had a brief stint down in Branson with the Titanic [Museum] and then I found my way to Millwood. I was there the previous three years. I was the sales director, the marketing coordinator and I did a lot of stuff with special events (such as) golf tournaments and all the parties, but my emphasis was on sales and marketing management.”
Writing on the Wall “About nine months ago, I officially ended my term at Millwood. … I saw the general trend of the industry. I saw country club memberships going down. It is just one of those industries like life insurance, when hard times hit, people get rid of luxury items. Country club memberships were definitely a luxury item that both corporations and families wanted to drop. With retention, we’d lose 10 percent to 20 percent and then gain only 5 percent. So, if was tough to keep memberships going, and trying to sell golf memberships in the winter time was like to trying to sell ice to an Eskimo. ... I had a fear, but it had nothing to do with the family or (Keith) Keltner’s retirement plans or the fact that he was selling, it was just that I had seen the trend of the country club industry. With a couple of babies in the house, and only one income coming in, I was just really skeptical of the industry in general.”
On the Job “It has been an interesting first month. We usually have a special event every day or two. We have a lot of business networking that happens internally at the chamber. We’ll have our XMIN – our Exceptional Men in Business – that is a networking group that we run within the chamber. We have WWIN, Working Women in Nixa. We have catering for their meetings. The XMIN have a crew of anywhere from 10 to 20 people, and WWIN will have about 50. We also have a general luncheon every month (with) about 150 who attend that. … We have a big golf tournament coming up, and all of our special events can take four to five months of planning. On top of that, every day I have four to five meetings lined up with everybody from community leaders, to school leaders to city officials, and not-for-profits to business networks.”
Member Focused “We are hovering around 500 right now. I can tell you the majority of them are small businesses. I think 65 percent of our membership is under 10 employees, and 83 percent of our membership is under 20. (Small businesses) are really the nuts and bolts of our chamber. In Nixa, there are only a handful of employers that have more than 50 employees. … My major goal for the chamber is to retain and grow membership. … I would love to increase the number of booths, or the gross dollar amount, we receive at Nixpo. I’d like to see increases with any of our staple events, whether that is Nixpo or Leadercast or our general member luncheon.”
Fiber-optic Fix “The long-term vision is to work with the city, the county and the public schools system to develop a business strategy, which would take everyone pulling together. I’m working with the city on economic development to get things growing around here. I know right now we have a 29 percent vacancy rate with commercial units, and that’s unacceptable to me.
“One long-term strategy that I think is really (important) to Nixa is fiber optics. ... We need to fill that vacancy in the industrial park, which is around 30 percent to 40 percent. A lot of the reason is due to utilities. (Businesses) can’t tap into a really good local area network, but we see the [fiber-optic] corridor running down [U.S.] 160 past the industrial park and cutting across [Highway] 14. The fiber corridor cuts right through the heart of Nixa, and we have to take advantage of that.”[[In-content Ad]]
