Smart Ideas

New kid in town

By Daniel G. Jacobs

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Formed in 1995 as the Northeast Ohio Area Chambers of Commerce, the organization has grown to 50 Cleveland area members, and with the addition of Wauseon, west of Toledo, now includes chambers that are decidedly outside the Northeast Ohio area boundaries that encompassed the organization's original mission.

"It's almost like counting Bill Gates' money," Bill Ryan, one of the early organizers, says tongue-in-cheek. "We don't really know how many we've got because somebody might have decided yesterday to join. It's a good situation. NOACC is a voluntary alliance of chambers of commerce which provides negotiated, competitive benefits for the retention and attraction of members, and promotes professional growth and operational efficiency."

While Ryan, president of Master Consulting Group, readily admits his comments are pure hyperbole, the overall sentiment is quite real. In the time it took to write this story, several chambers from all over Northern Ohio joined the organization. At press time the Cleveland area number was 50; 29 Toledo area companies are in the process of joining.

NOACC, it appears, is evolving. Here's how it's done so.

Size matters

Historically, chambers of commerce struggle to maintain their membership. Those in the Cleveland area are no different.

In the early 1990s, many local chambers were losing members, says Bill Russo, chairman of NOACC's board of directors. They weren't serving as a strong voice for business, and without the ability to aggregate huge numbers of businesses, their power to provide extra services was limited.

NOACC changed all that by pulling together dozens of chambers and using their collective business mass, to date more than 16,000, to sign up service providers.

"It's a numbers game," explains Ron White, director of the Beachwood Chamber of Commerce.

His organization by itself simply wasn't big enough.

"We really needed some help. Now we're really at a point to be attractive to some vendors."

White served as NOACC's first chairperson.

The first, and arguably most important, benefit is the health care plan provided by Anthem Blue Cross & Blue Shield, although at the time, Anthem was not part of the BC&BS name. The benefit of the relationship is not lost on the providers.

"That name carries a lot of weight," says Joe LaGuardia, regional vice president of Ohio sales for Anthem. "(NOACC) provides a lot of value."

Ryan helped orchestrate the development of one of the first benefits, a Community Mutual Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurance product, for the Beachwood Chamber of Commerce. In 1992, the Beachwood Chamber worked with the chambers of Euclid and Solon to produce a series of seminars. The three agencies shared both the risks and the rewards.

That partnership -- along with the health insurance product that gave chamber members discounts -- became the drawing card that led to the formation of NOACC.

In addition to health insurance, NOACC benefits include retirement plan administration, natural gas discounts, freight delivery discounts, employee testing discounts, an employee wellness program, mortgage brokerage and Web site development. There are nearly 20 benefits, and NOACC's executives are always looking for ways to enhance the offerings.

Maintain focus

There was never any intention to layer on another identity, White says, so the benefits appear to come through the business's chambers. NOACC is simply a support group that enhances those organizations.

The obvious comparison is to COSE, the country's largest chamber of commerce. And, while there are many similarities between the organizations, NOACC organizers don't look at COSE as a rival.

"I would not describe NOACC really as a competitor of COSE," says Alan Ross, of Ross, Brittain & Schonberg. The firm, along with its workers' compensation service arm, Comprehensive Risk Management, was selected to implement a workers' compensation group plan for NOACC.

"It is serving these small local chambers' interests through a league," Ross says. "I don't see it as competing any more with COSE than it does with any other group that sells health insurance, that has a group rating plan for workers' comp, that has a long distance program. Every trade association has that. COSE is no more a competitor than anybody else."

There is a place for both organizations in Cleveland, says Steve Millard, COSE's executive director.

"No large organization or confederation of organizations can work on behalf of a local community as well as a local chamber can," he says. "We have worked with local chambers over the past few years, through everything we do."

He says COSE does lots of development issues in local communities.

"We encourage, on a regular basis, members to seek out their local chambers for those local issues. We can leverage over a couple hundred thousand lives to create really good savings for small businesses in some of the programs," he says. "That's what COSE's role has been and will continue to be. We're working a lot now; we're trying to reach and work with local chambers to try and complement what they're doing.

"We don't want to do what they do; we don't think we can do it as well as they can."

If it weren't for COSE, NOACC might not exist, Ross says.

"These smaller chambers, one by one, have their members being picked off," he says. "And what is so critically important to local chambers is, who else addresses really local concerns? COSE is not going to take up the fight of what kind of street signs or exterior lighting should be down the street in North Olmsted.

"If these individual chambers don't survive because COSE puts them out of business, it literally drives the individual chambers into the league."

Scott Lyon, executive director of Group Services Inc., the benefits arm of COSE, believes there is room for both organizations.

"There is a role that an organization like COSE and the Growth Association play in the member services arena and in the advocacy arena and the economic arena," he says. "And there is a role that a local chamber plays in that. And those are complementary rather than confrontational. What we have said time and again is companies should be a member of their local chamber of commerce.

"But they should also look at COSE as an organization because we're operating on a different level."

The key difference is that the Council of Smaller Enterprises is a regional chamber, while NOACC views itself as an association of local chambers. But there is no doubt that both organizations ultimately provide the same types of services to the same companies -- NOACC through the chambers and COSE directly.

At its inception, NOACC was little more than a phone number. The organization had no office and was staffed by volunteers. Since then, it has blossomed more through word of mouth than through any marketing effort.

"What we're trying to do is support the local businesses in their own communities in the best way we can by providing benefits for the chambers," says NOACC Executive Director Kim Storey. "Our mission is to help that local chamber."

As Ross says, "NOACC is a resource for independent chambers. That's what it's intended to do. The longer it's around and the more programs it puts together, the more of a valuable resource it has become to individual chambers."How to reach: NOACC, (216) 831-2065 or http://www.noacc.org/

Daniel G. Jacobs mailto:djacobs@sbnnet.com is senior editor of SBN.