White led chamber through shift in focus
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Lily White, executive director of the Greater Maryville Chamber of Commerce, opens the dirt-turning ceremony in 2019 at the Downtown Maryville Pocket Park located on the corner of Main and Third streets.
MARYVILLE, Mo. — Perhaps the youngest and longest-serving full-time director of the Greater Maryville Chamber of Commerce announced last week that she will be moving on at the end of the month, handing off an organization that has been reorganized and rejuvenated during her nearly five-year tenure.
White, who began as chamber director in 2016, said she has accepted a position as vice president of external affairs at the Columbia Chamber of Commerce in Columbia, Missouri. Her last day at the Greater Maryville Chamber of Commerce will be July 29.
Her nearly five-year term may be the longest since the organization first moved to a full-time director in 1986 — and nothing may be more emblematic of her impact during that time than the uncertainty of whether that’s actually the case, and whether, at 23, she was truly the youngest to steer the organization.
While White said both things are probably true, high turnover in the position has meant a short institutional memory, making starting from scratch the norm for most of her predecessors. Prior to White, she said, no director had stayed in the position for more than two years since 2008.
Consequently, when she took over in 2016, White said she frequently heard from community members that she wouldn’t be long for the job, and would be out within two years.
“So you just get in your head: We’re never going to have that person, we’re never going to have a person that figures it out,” White said. “And maybe that’s an organizational thing, maybe it’s a community thing, maybe those people just aren’t strong enough — I don’t know. And I think it can be a lot of things.”
But during a statewide training conference, another chamber director told White that she would know within six months if she was going to wash out after two years, or if this was the right fit for her.
“And if it’s in you, you’re a little bit crazy, but there’s also nothing else like it,” White said she was told. “You can’t go to a different job and do all the things you do in the chamber world.”
The crystallizing moment came quickly during those first six months, White said, when an event she had pushed to start was shot down by the board. It was her first major setback, and she spent the night brooding over what to do next. Her conclusion?
Double down.
“I was so mad, and I was so hurt,” she said. “And I was like, you know what I’m going to do? And the next day I came in and I had like five different events planned already.”
Over the next five years, White worked to focus the organization’s mission, culminating in a rebranding and change of scope for the chamber’s efforts last year. Gone were some community events, like the community pep rally and the Christmas parade, that White felt didn’t fit into the chamber’s overarching goals — result of inevitable “mission creep” that happens when a group of people with good intentions take on more and more responsibility. The booster club and Downtown Maryville took over the pep rally and parade respectively.
“So, with the rebrand, we really figured out who we were as an organization, and then it wasn’t just, here’s this pretty statement and this pretty new logo, it was, OK, now we have to go really be about what we’re saying that we really are,” she said. “And that means cutting down on some of this stuff, but to make the other stuff better.”
Instead, White moved the organization’s focus to other efforts, like Leadership Maryville, and placed a greater emphasis on being advocates for chamber members in the community and in government.
When White began, she said, what little government advocacy work the chamber did was unfocused and didn’t have a system for taking into account feedback and concerns from member businesses.
“When we look at our businesses and we say we advocate for you, that means that we educate our businesses on what we’re advocating for, we take what our businesses are saying to us, and we make that part of our advocacy,” she said. “And it’s such a — not even a two-way street, it’s like a seven-lane street that’s going all directions. We have to have a great relationship with our city and our county and then our state elected officials, all the way up to (federal officials).”
Those relationships paid off in tangible ways when working to pass a use tax in 2019. The measure, which had narrowly failed in November 2018, was passed the next April, adding the local sales tax to items purchased from online retailers and shipped to residences within city limits — putting local brick-and-mortar stores back on a more level playing field.
“That one, there really wasn’t a question of how does this affect our businesses,” White said. “It was more, this failed last time — why did it fail? What happened there, and how do we make sure that that doesn’t happen? Because this does fall in line so much with our mission and what we need for our businesses. And it took a couple conversations.”
White said because the chamber had built relationships with both community members and local government officials, that allowed the chamber to take the lead on pushing the initiative and making headway on communicating to voters about its effects.
“When the use tax passed, we were the ones printing, we were the ones running ads, we were the ones standing at Hy-Vee,” White said. “… So much of that is just education. Like, I don’t think our community drastically changed between (November and April), but, we’ve gotten so much better at educating our community.”
In fiscal year 2020, the use tax brought in nearly half a million new dollars to city coffers.
During the pandemic, those relationships with local government once again came to the fore when in June of last year, White and Josh McKim, head of Nodaway County Economic Development, worked with the county commissioners and built a framework for businesses to get access to federal CARES Act funding through a grant process. White said that without those prior relationships in place, it may not have been as successful a partnership.
By February 2021, $800,000 had been distributed through the small business relief grants.
Another of White’s particular focuses was Leadership Maryville, a course that will celebrate its 35th year this year of exposing future community leaders to new ideas, methods and people. When White took over, the previous year’s graduating class would be responsible for the content of the next year’s class, resulting in necessarily high turnover and a scattershot approach to the quality and quantity that would vary from year to year.
By 2019, White did what she had done and would continue to do with many other programs the chamber offered: she looked at other similar, successful programs in other parts of the state and country, and built a model that would work for Maryville. That resulted in a board that rotates in and out members of each graduating class, with each member serving five years — ensuring continuity and consistency.
Building that same kind of continuity and consistency across the chamber as a whole is what White said she’s probably most proud of, and what makes for an organization able to keep its momentum — of which there is plenty — even with a new director, who will face their own, new challenges.
To meet those challenges, White said she’d give the same advice she was given when she started.
“We have a lot of naysayers, and every town does,” White said. “… But the people that are excited about our town, and the businesses that invest in our town … they deserve people that are a little bit crazy and try to make it better. And I feel like, you know, I got really good at being a little crazy and trying to get our board to try new things and to do new things. And when you sit down and think about the things that, tangibly, I got to touch or do in the last five years, it’s insane.
“I don’t think any of it was me, but, just to be a part of all of it — there’s nothing like it.”
And her successor, she’s betting, will be around longer than two years, too.
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Suzanne Von Behren drives Friday in the fifth annual Greater Maryville Chamber of Commerce Christmas Parade with Susan Henggeler and Lily White, chamber director.
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A Legislative Coffee was held online by the Greater Maryville Chamber of Commerce in 2020. Sen. Dan Hegeman and Rep. Allen Andrews gave updates about the legislative session. Clockwise from top left: Hegeman, Andrews, Nodaway County Economic Development Executive Director Josh McKim and chamber Executive Director Lily White.
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Lily White, executive director of the Greater Maryville Chamber of Commerce, offered that she wasn’t surprised by how many community members attended a ribbon cutting at Mosaic Medical Center – Maryville. “This is the way that we roll,” she said.
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Nodaway Valley Bank was awarded a Milestone Award recognizing its 150th year in business at the annual Chamber Banquet in 2019. Pictured are Sean Sheil, left, and Brian Schieber, right, who accepted the award from Chamber Director Lily White.
