The Obvious Podcast

72 – Raising Arizona

• ABC Florida East Coast Chapter • Season 2 • Episode 72

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In this episode, Peter and Sonny address ABC-FEC’s leadership culture and commitment to employee development, drawing insights from our recent experience at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Organization Management in Tucson. They reflect on how ABC-FEC’s long-standing investment in its people continues to set the organization ahead of its peers.

The full audiovisual version of this episode is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/EDI3azCd9Cg 

“The Obvious Podcast” is a production of ABC Florida East Coast Chapter. Unless otherwise stated, all content reflects the opinions of the guests and hosts.

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Sonny Maken

Welcome to the Obvious Podcast. This is episode number 72. I'm Sonny Maken.

Peter Dyga

And I'm Peter Dyga, President and CEO at ABC Florida East Coast chapter.

Sonny Maken

You are listening to the Obvious Podcast or watching it, where all opinions expressed are our own unless we say otherwise.

Peter Dyga

Love the show, subscribe on any major podcast platform or watch us in action on YouTube. Follow the Obvious Podcast on Instagram, X, and Truth Social, and now on TikTok. All the links you need are in the show notes. Reach out to us anytime theobvious@abceastflorida.com. And if you're enjoying the ride, help others find us by leaving a review wherever you listen. Happy Friday, Sonny.

Sonny Maken

Happy Friday. Uh man, this year has been off. I can't believe it's already uh January, whatever the date is today. Like it's right. We're through uh today's January 16th. It's insane how fast time is halfway through the first month already.

Peter Dyga

Yeah. I always say that every January. Yeah. Right? It's like because you know, at the beginning of the year, you're looking at it, I think, more in piecemeal, you know, month by month, and you're like, we're halfway through one month already.

Sonny Maken

I mean uh Well, there's that there's that uh weird uh week between Christmas and New Year's where you don't know what day it is or you know what's going on, and then all of a sudden you're back in the office and then boom, it's like the 16th of January.

Peter Dyga

Several of us at the ABC Florida East Coast staff, chapter staff, um uh uh kicked it off kicked off the new year right away with uh we did going out to a conference, right?

Sonny Maken

Yes. Uh as you know, Peter, because of you, there's a long history of leadership development, you know, employee development that we do, you know, we support um just so much of this sort of learning that uh our staff gets to do. And part of that is participating in this really interesting conference, um, or not a conference, it's a really a school certification program called the Institute of Organizational Management, IOM. And it is put on by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And they have picked four cities around the country. Mostly they are all kind of secondary college towns, and they're like a pain in the butt to get to. Um and they do these, they they do the classes on these college campuses and they bring in these thought leaders and and you learn how to how to run it.

Peter Dyga

It's a four-year program. It's a four-year program. So you go for a week um over the course of four years. So and it's a it's a pretty old program too. I don't know exactly when they started it, but it's been around a while.

Sonny Maken

So I found out this uh this past week uh in the program in Tucson, Arizona, has been meeting at the University of Arizona for like a hundred and two hundred and three uh weeks. So uh well, I mean, would that be 103 years? Holy cow.

Peter Dyga

Wow.

Sonny Maken

That's amazing. That is amazing. Yeah.

Peter Dyga

So anyway, somebody had asked, I think we had uh referenced this to some of our leadership, and they were like, is this just for nonprofit? And in essence, it is, right? It's for uh chamber and chambers, nonprofits, trade associations.

Sonny Maken

Yeah. It's to learn to learn how to, you know, manage them effectively, grow.

Peter Dyga

Um but I wanted to ask you, you know, we have you know, because we have deal with volunteer leaders and strategic planning and and nonprofit laws, different. The difference between management and government. Financials are different. And anyway, it's uh Exactly. We we make it available to anybody who has any kind of an interest here. Um you know, there's uh certainly 67 ABC chapters around the country, all of which have a president and CEO and management, but there's uh thousands upon thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of nonprofits of chambers and whatnot. Chambers. If anybody ever wanted to get into this business, we want to encourage that.

Sonny Maken

Yeah, so we had uh we had a very you know distinguished group from our from our office go. Mr. Producer went for his first year. Um our head of IT went. Um our development director for the foundation, he went as well. That I think it was his third year. I was there. Um and it it's such an interesting, uh, it's an interesting group of people. Obviously, they're people from all over the country. Um and you just realize, I just realized, and I think our team just realized, there were a lot of like questions in classes like does your organization do this and does your organization do that? You know, and talking about best practices.

Peter Dyga

Yeah, I mean, that's part of it, right? Uh with your um classmates and developing a relationship with them and and um learning from one another. Exactly.

Sonny Maken

And so we, you know, obviously we have a rich history of of developing our staff here and and and supporting that development, right? Like it's not just a word about that.

Peter Dyga

Go it's uh one of the things we do. It's it's on that list that you'll go through one of those four years, I'm guessing, uh, where they'll talk about uh the best practices. Um the best nonprofits will do a assessment of their board. You know, so and in fact, we do do that. So uh sometimes, usually during summer, we ask our board to do a self-assessment, and we ask them about all a whole range of uh different things. And one of the ones, by the way, we score, you know, we score, I forget there's a name, I think, for the scale, a one to five. I forget what the name is, but we use that scale, and um almost everything scores four or higher, uh, which is great, which means our our board is very comfortable in a lot of these governance areas. Uh but the one that scores the lowest, closer to four rather than five, or one of the ones that consistently does, is the board's level of comfort or understanding about how much we support as a chapter of professional development. Yep. And it's always been frustrating to me because they they they approve the budget every year. I mean, we spend uh you know a fair amount of money in the organization. And it's not just things like IOM. It can be online classes, it could be, you know, as you can imagine, that's it, webinars, it could be a whole host of uh professional development conferences, many of which are ABC. Uh you learn a lot from going to them. Um so in any event, we we have a we do have a and it predates me. I mean, I'm I'm a graduate of IOM, and my predecessor and mentor, Dan Shaw, encouraged me to go. I think I graduated in 05, so it's been 20 years or so. But um, it was it was instrumental for me. And you and you also went to Tucson campus. I did. Um, so did most of our staff. And we all pick it because it just fits best for our you get too much into the year, and we'll, you know.

Sonny Maken

But in case you're wondering why this episode is called Raising Arizona, is because we all spend a week in the desert, and but what a strange city that is, right? Like I love the fact that the airport is so small. And but it is just such a combination of dumpy and beautiful. Like it just, you know, you're driving around, you're like, what is this place? And then you look at the mountains and the and the and the and the sky sort of clouds touching the top of the mountains.

Peter Dyga

Beautiful. I remember when I went, um, there was a resort town, the ski town, very close. I think I drove up there. There's no snow at uh at then, although there could be, right? Early January. I think it snowed uh this. But isn't that crazy? If you're in Phoenix and you're you're in Tucson, Arizona, and like within driving distance, there's a ski town or a ski resort. Yeah. You know, it's I think it's known for the uh airplane or whatever graveyard. And there was uh another relic of the past is uh missile silos. I think there's some missile silos there that I I toured, some iconic uh uh churches in the desert, the white um Pueblo and more Mexicano architecture. Great Mexican food, by the way.

Sonny Maken

Good Mexican food. You realize how terrible the Mexican food in Florida is when you when you eat in Arizona, that's for sure. Yeah, you don't come to Florida for Mexican food, that's for sure. Cuban is good here.

Peter Dyga

Right. Other Latino foods are great. So but any event. It is an interesting place. And as you as you mentioned, all four of the locations are usually these second-tier. Except for Except for Philadelphia. They there's one in Madison, Wisconsin, Athens, Georgia. They're all tied to another a school. They're all tied to a school. So and the one in Tucson is great. You're in kind of the thick of the campus. Yeah. Um, absolutely, right in the middle of it.

Sonny Maken

And it's a it's a it's a very interesting, unique sort of idea and how to sort of perpetuate and populate best practices in in this industry. And you know, we uh and it just wasn't us. There were other ABC chapters as well. I know Central Texas had somebody there, um Heart of America. That's New York, right? Heart of America?

Peter Dyga

No, that's um uh Missouri, Kansas. Missouri.

Sonny Maken

That's right. Uh Keystone, which is Pennsylvania, and then Western Washington, which is Western Washington. So Washington State, not D.C.

Peter Dyga

There's that many ABC folks there. Yeah, there's a guys even snapped a picture. Yeah, we have to do that. Eight different ABC chapters, eight different people. Yeah. So that's phenomenal. That's pretty cool. That's just one of the four. So that's great that ABC is chapters around the country are are doing that, and that you all have that uh uh I don't know, group within a group, yeah, so to speak.

Sonny Maken

And then you meet these people that are like running these associations. Like I met this lady from uh Washington, D.C. and it was like the Gravel Association, you know, and she's like I'm in the rocks business. Yeah. Um literally is an association for everything for everything. There was one for chain uh chain store, uh chain drug stores was one uh that was I was sitting next to like two of their people, raw gravel and um uh kind of packaged goods, consumer packaged goods. Unreal, right?

Peter Dyga

Like but the challenges and the are all the are very similar. Are very similar. Absolutely. So tell us a little more about your if you were in your second year about the at least the first two years of the curriculum, what you noticed from year one to two, and uh what you noticed about your fellow um students.

Sonny Maken

So I was uh flabbergasted my the first time I went, and then this year as well. I was very surprised by how small most of these chambers are. You know, like there's a there's a class on a certain topic, and there's all of these things that are kind of discussed, and the person next to me will say, Well, I can't do all of that. It's just me and one part-time person. I don't have time for this. You know, that was a very common refrain you heard in terms of how to grow. And you know, there were some large organizations there too, but by far I think we were certainly one of the largest in terms of the number of employees and the and the size of our PL and all of that. Uh, I know one of our instructors uses our strategic plan uh to talk a little bit about it.

Peter Dyga

Somebody you guys came back and told me about that experience, which is pretty cool.

Sonny Maken

Yeah.

Peter Dyga

Um some of our leadership and members may be uh interested to know that uh because of my experience there, I got to develop a relationship with some of the uh faculty. And um some of them over the years have led our strategic planning. Right. So I think that's that's where he got it. You know, they were at our strategic planning, and they it's quite a compliment, I think, that he's a faculty member at IOM and he uses us as an ex a positive example of uh an organization that's doing it well. I think absolutely it's pretty cool.

Sonny Maken

And so that was uh I think that uh affirmation and confirmation that how many of these best practices we do um that are um baked into our DNA already. And I think it's because of your leadership and your expertise in in this arena, and then the the fact that you are also an IM grad, I think was it's it's comforting, right? And you you you're listening to this, you're watching this, and and there are people taking furious notes because to them it's new information. But to me, it's yeah, we've we've sure we've done this for a long time at our at our organization.

Peter Dyga

Sure. In many ways, we're there, we're maybe giving as much as we're getting, yeah, which is nice.

Sonny Maken

And that somebody somebody looked at me and said, you know, your organization, you should be mentoring the smaller organizations here. And I was like, Yeah, I'm happy to, you know, help. Um and not because we're you know, we're some rocket scientists, but we we've kind of implemented a lot of these best practices and seen the benefits of it. So really enjoyed that. But the one thing that really um struck out at me, because I always kind of like to come away with these things and be like, okay, what did I learn? You know, what what's gonna be sort of transformative and uh and all of this? Uh there was a class on government affairs that I took. Uh it was taught by a gentleman. He was one of those guys, you know, the kind of guys who wears like a bow tie, like a snazzy dresser guy. He was the bow tie guy. Okay. He was the member of a city council somewhere. Okay. One of those Midwestern states that you always confuse, like Ohio or Michigan, or one of those states. I can't really remember now which state he was in. But he had a very thorough presentation, and you know, because because so many organizations, so many people are in so many different uh levels of development of their organization. So he has to kind of start at the basics. And and one of his very first slides was you know, why government affairs? And he had this data point from uh research done by McKinsey, which is a large consulting uh organization.

Peter Dyga

When you came back and told me the story, I really love this because I mean, literally, I think over my 26 years, yeah, this is an ongoing conversation about uh what's the primary reason most people join, you know, an association. Uh and the common answer, and and I think, you know, probably for the most part correct, which is networking. You know, people want to join to develop their network and do more business. But but but this particular experience in class drove home this point, this point about government affairs, which again is sometimes is poo-pooed. Uh obviously we don't feel that way. We have significant commitment to it as an association and as a chapter. But anyway, sorry.

Sonny Maken

But I think it's I think for our members, right? Like and this is uh and I'm gonna read to you exactly what he had on his slide. Uh slide was called Importance of Government Affairs. I took a picture of it, and I you know, usually I'm never taking pictures of these things. Can be very valuable for an organization's mission. He goes, and this is a McKinsey study. Business value related to government. 30% of earnings for all businesses, over 50% of earnings for banking and financial sector.

Peter Dyga

I mean that You and I, I think, had a conversation uh when you came back uh that I wouldn't be surprised if it's that high or higher for construction. For construction, yeah, because we're heavily regulated um industry. But at a minimum 30. At a minimum. No, probably something north of that. But what's the what was the point of that? The 30 percent. That it's impacted uh that's the impact on your earnings. 30 percent. So but basically it's showing for our trade association or an association why you invest in government affairs because it's impacting 13 percent plus of our members of your members' earnings. So which is you know, they they don't they're not gonna know that. Exactly. Right? I mean, they're per se.

Sonny Maken

Unless they're paying attention to what McKinsey's putting out, right? Right. I thought that was a very interesting because it's a huge um what's the word I'm looking for? It's a huge element of what we do at ABC, right? Like we have value for sure. Our value proposition. Um I think I can announce we have just hired an assistant government affairs director. Um, I'll wait to announce his name later. But um, you know, we're about to go, you know, Tallahassee is about to come up, our ledge con. We did an episode on that talking about why that was important. You know, we invest a lot of money and a lot of resources and a lot of manpower and a lot of uh time in government government affairs, and we do it because it's important.

Peter Dyga

Those that don't know, I mean, not only is it uh for a number of years, our leadership has budgeted, or well, we've we've recommended and they've approved a budget for two or anywhere from one and a half to two full-time people at the chapter, which again generally is referred to as government affairs uh person. So somebody who does government affairs work is somebody who maybe works for a single employer like us and and their interests. But on top of that, we also budget and invest in a number of outside contract lobbyists. So, you know, that's somebody who's outside your firm that you go out and you pay them a, you know, um they have multiple clients, so you're one of many, but you pay them to and then generally they sometimes they kind of uh specialize in certain fields. So, you know, we have one that uh we've had for a number of years at the state level that has helped us on education issues. Uh a number of years back, we we hired one at the federal level as well. Different areas where we needed we needed help, we needed work, and they've been very instrumental. And and again, I was so proud we had the first committee meeting of the new year at the ABC was our government affairs committee, you know. And it was uh spectacularly uh uh attended and we had all of our uh government affairs and lobbying personnel give updates, and it just really drove home and showed the level of commitment of this chapter to and uh government affairs, you know, and to impacting both at the fed at the federal, state, and local level. Yeah.

Sonny Maken

Um good solid uh governance or or but there's a direct correlation between uh everything we invest and the impact and the benefit our members get.

Peter Dyga

Absolutely. There's a clear linear um relationship. Were people surprised? Yeah, I think people were surprised. I I at this point. It's all about the business development and networking and you know so right.

Sonny Maken

So there's a lot that's the pre preconceived notion, right? That this is members join so that they can uh expand their network and do business with one another. Yeah. Which obviously is important, it's it's a critical piece.

Peter Dyga

But probably what drives most people, right? Yeah. We talk a lot around here. Uh any government affairs person we've ever hired, I think I've had that conversation. We've had that conversation of a big part of your job, it's not just the the government affairs work, but it's I I call it the internal grassroots because you know, generally members there might be a few, but generally members don't come with sign me up for the government affairs. Exactly. They come to they come to learn and appreciate, I think, a little bit more the impact uh that government at all levels is having on them, and then uh we develop them to someone who wants to get engaged and involved and help us, um, if you will, develop that agenda.

Sonny Maken

You know, so you just mentioned our government affairs legislative committee meeting. As you remember, there were some new faces there that hadn't been there before. And it was interesting to me that the new faces were essentially told by other members who've been involved in government affairs, hey, this is super important, this is super cool, you'll have a good time, go join this committee. Right. So the word of mouth of people who've actually experienced the the impact of a robust government affairs department, of a robust um impact of that, are now telling their people in their organizations, the younger people to go to come and get involved. And I think that's you can't think of a better testimony than that. Agreed. That's awesome. That's awesome. Asking them to come and get involved because they realize how important this is.

Peter Dyga

So it also interestingly, I think, has come in many ways to be known as uh a great leadership development or place to be recognized and seen and show. So and anyway, I don't know just how that happened, but it has, I think.

Sonny Maken

I think it has because we we do a phenomenal job in terms of investing in it, bringing on the right people. You know, we have a great team at state, you know, between um Carol and Gray Robinson. You know, we have uh tremendous influence in Tallahassee.

Peter Dyga

We obviously have great influence now. So now a good time maybe for one last pitch. Come out next week. We'll still try to accommodate you. Yes. Uh we're gonna be in Tallahassee. Come out and meet part of this government affairs and lobbying team. And as we have to meet the new guy. Yeah, meet the new guy. And so we like to say become a lobbyist for a day. Um the things that the state does uh or or laws at the state level impact you significantly to the McKinsey to the point of the McKinsey study and the class that you were in out at IOM. It butters your bread, as as TC would say. That's great. Yeah. So what else from IOM? What was your uh you know, I think most of the other uh employees that came back were really enthused, looking forward to it. Mr. Producer was very happy.

Sonny Maken

He he was learning a lot. Um I think at meal times he was sharing a lot of stuff with me. And um our um director of IT was very, very impressed, you know. But he was he had the same takeaway as me that you know it felt comforting to know just that so many of what they're teaching us, we already do. And it's part of our DNA and um part of our sort of institutional history here.

Peter Dyga

That uh so anyway, thanks to our board for approving that budget every year and having a high level of commitment. Next time we do that board assessment, hopefully you have a if you've listened to this, we hope all of our board members have, you have a better understanding of our level of commitment to and that's just one small conference. Uh yeah.

Sonny Maken

I mean we do so much and they you remember that meme like that made the round a few years ago. They were like, um what if I what if I invest in my employee and he leaves? Yeah. Right? And then the response is worse.

Peter Dyga

I we say that a lot. What's worse than uh you know, like the institute gets that a lot, you know, because we do charge a contractor fee for our apprentices, and it's not required in Florida statute, and a lot of our competitors don't. And sometimes some of the pushback you get from employers, um specialty and trade contractors is what if I invest all this money and my employee leaves, you know? And the name is right. What's what's worse than that? It's like not investing and the stay. And so, you know, I love the fact that our organizational DNA is. Professional display. This has been a great episode. You know. So anyway, welcome back from IOM. Uh to you and the uh Three staff members that went and got a lot out of it. And uh it's great having people with this uh new knowledge and uh maybe even a different level of appreciation about the organization and and uh the things we're achieving here. Absolutely. Thanks for being part of it, our listeners.

Sonny Maken

So thank you for listening.

Peter Dyga

If you're not a member, we want you to join too. So email us. We'll hook you up. Yep.

Sonny Maken

theobvious@abceastflorida.com.

Peter Dyga

Thanks for listening. We're honored to uh have you, and then you've honored us with your time. We look forward to uh sharing another episode with you next Friday. See ya. Ciao