Not long ago, I was doing some consulting for a local Chamber of Commerce. Seeing as it was in the greater Los Angeles area, I was looking at all of the other chambers of commerce in LA and all the suburb cities. Specifically I was looking at what type of members they had, and what the percentages of large corporations to small businesses happen to be.
It turns out that most of these small businesses that belonged to the chambers were either one man operations, or less than 10 employees. The second large category happen to be franchised companies, that is to say franchised outlets with 20 or fewer employees per location. The final category and the smallest were the large corporations. Now then, in looking at all this data it seems that these chambers were missing a huge part of their audience. Let me explain.
Most small cities in and around Los Angeles -- I would call those cities of under 100,000 in population --have about 6 to 10,000 business licenses. In other words, 6 to 10% of the population is either self-employed or running a business. The greatest percentage of businesses are home-based businesses and they are barely on the radar screen, many of them don't even have business licenses although they should. It seems to me the local chambers would be wise to go after this group. However, they aren't, and they are underrepresented in the various rosters of membership at these chambers within the greater LA area.
Indeed, I would imagine that is a similar situation in all the other DMAs throughout the country. Now then, what can a chamber do to recruit more of these home-based businesses to their membership roster? Well, first they have to stop thinking that they can charge the full price. Many chambers of commerce in larger cities, those cities over 100,000 population run $350 or more even if they have 0 to 1 employees. That certainly isn't in the cards for someone that has a small multilevel marketing business who paid less than $100 to start their company. To charge them $350 doesn't make a lot of sense, and they are less apt to join.
Today, many people run a small website and perhaps sell wares on the Internet, or even run a blog and sell advertising. These are in essence very tiny small businesses, and they could definitely use a real-world presence in their networking and business associations. The chamber could be perfect for that and to fulfill that need, but the chambers aren't doing anything about it. I think they should. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
