New chamber president expresses need for specific strategies, community involvement
Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce President Beth Quartarolo, now on the job for two months, sat down with Vancouver Business Journal Reporter Neil Zawicki to discuss where she sees the GVCC going and what concerns she is hearing from the business community. Quartarolo spent 12 years with Hewlett Packard in Vancouver as its communications director and brings a strong personal perspective of the market to her position as president of the largest chamber in Southwest Washington.
VBJ: What are you hearing from the business community? What are some concerns?
Quartarolo: I’ve made a point to go out and talk to business owners, and I don’t think that there’s general agreement yet on what we mean by "open for business." That phrase gets tossed around a lot, whether it’s Vancouver or Clark County. And I think one of the opportunities that we have as a business community is to get specific on what we mean by that. So, what does a community that is open for business look like? And that could mean anything from tax policy to the permitting process to having a strategic plan in place to say "this is how we want to grow." And I think some of that is there, but perhaps there are opportunities to communicate about it in a more quizzical fashion. There are opportunities for the business community to work with elected officials on what we think that would look like. And that to me is kind of exciting, because I think there are some opportunities there for some real breakthrough thinking if we had a roundtable to talk about it.
VBJ: What do you think a community that is open for business means?
Quartarolo: I haven’t decided yet. In six weeks on the job, I don’t know, but if we can take a look at other communities…. I’m very big on "best practices," you know, "stealing with pride," so to speak. It takes time to do that; you have to take time to look at what other communities are doing, do some benchmarking, and say we like what we see happening here, we love what we see happening there, and let’s move forward as a community in the way that some other places have done – and maybe even better than some other places have done. And I really just don’t think that that whole exercise has ever really happened in a coherent sort of way.
VBJ: So, looking at other communities and modeling on them.
Quartarolo: Yeah, not necessarily that we need to be a bunch of copycats, but I do believe very strongly in not reinventing the wheel if we don’t have to – like I said, stealing with pride, the best from the best. And then you have to put your own flavor on it, and ask, "How do we put it together in a strategy that really works for our region?"
VBJ: In terms of the region, is the chamber moving out of the city and into a more regional mindset?
Quartarolo: The chamber has always been about more than just Vancouver, to my way of thinking. When I was working at HP I had to think beyond just sort of the confines of downtown, and it’s not that downtown isn’t extremely important, but our focus and our membership has been downtown and beyond. The chamber has members that go all over the county and into Portland and to other counties, too. So it’s incumbent upon us for our focus to be broad.
VBJ: How about the B&O tax, or rather, the ongoing debate on how best to generate revenue from businesses?
Quartarolo: Before I even took the job, the board had expressed its opposition to the ordinance. And the board has directed that we pull together a task force, what we call the city financing task force to look at other solutions. And at this point, that’s really what I have to report. We’ve had several meetings already but we don’t have any results yet. But there are a number of things that have been identified as not positive regarding this particular ordinance, and we’ve shared that with the city.
VBJ: You left HP just before the recent upheaval. What kind of knowledge do you feel you bring from that position and into your new post?
Quartarolo: I can tell you what I thought I brought to the table when I was interviewing for the (chamber) job, and it turned out they were things they were looking for. But, you know, being at HP, there was a lot of emphasis on strategy…. And at HP they like the term "critical fews;" we talk about what are the critical few vectors or areas that we need to focus on when it comes to using our resources. So that’s my preference, to look at strategy that way, and that was honed a lot by years at HP.
The second thing that I told the officers that I felt I brought to the table was this perspective that I call "downtown and beyond." I worked for a company that was not a downtown company; it was on the east side of town, it was in the high-tech industry, so it was a perspective that in some ways wasn’t traditional for old Vancouver or old Clark County. And I guess that was a perspective that the officers were glad I had.
And then the third piece that I thought I brought was good relationships, because I did do the work for HP for 12 years and got to know the community. In my public affairs work, I did government affairs and I had a whole part of my job that was about philanthropy and community relationships as well as the educational community. So, it’s a pretty broad range of relationships that I think I have and that I want to maintain. You know, when you look at the chamber and the fact that it touches on so many areas of the community, I thought that was a positive.
