[TRANSCRIPT]
0:00:00 - (Doug Jenkins): Findlayg up next on chamber amplified.
0:00:02 - (Steve Stivers): We bring people to Ohio every year, Doug, to the University of Findlay and other schools. 600,000 college students. Between 600, 650,000 college students are in Ohio on any given year. Many of them come here from out of state. The problem is when they graduate, they leave. And we need to keep some of those folks here.
0:00:27 - (Doug Jenkins): Hello and welcome to the show. I'm Doug Jenkins from the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce. On each episode of Chamber Amplified, we're.
0:00:33 - (C): Examining issues impacting the local business community.
0:00:36 - (Doug Jenkins): Whether it's employee recruitment and retention, marketing, it issues. It's really anything that can be impacting your business. Our goal is to give our members tips each week on at least one way they can improve operations and thrive in the current business environment. Well, welcome to episode 100 of Chamber Amplify. It is crazy to think we've done 100 of these now.
0:00:54 - (C): I think when we first started the.
0:00:56 - (Doug Jenkins): Podcast, we sort of just had the notion, hey, this is something we could.
0:00:59 - (C): Try out, see how it goes.
0:01:00 - (Doug Jenkins): And, well, here we are 100 episodes later. Thank you for tuning into them. With that in mind, we do have a special guest for today's show, Steve Stivers. He's the president and CEO of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. We'll be talking about the current business climate in Ohio, the concerns of businesses across the state, and of course, a heavy focus on what's being done at the state level about workforce retention and growth.
0:01:23 - (Doug Jenkins): Thanks again for tuning in. Remember, if you're listening on Apple podcasts or Spotify, you can rate and review the show. It really does help spread the word. Now let's get into it.
0:01:32 - (C): Thanks for joining us today, Doug.
0:01:34 - (Steve Stivers): It's great to be on. I understand this is your hundredth podcast, your centennial podcast. I'm honored to be on it.
0:01:41 - (C): Thank you. When we first started doing this, you wonder, like, all right, are we going to do like ten of these? How many are we going to do?
0:01:47 - (Doug Jenkins): And here we are at 100.
0:01:49 - (C): But we found it's been a really good way to relay information about what's happening in the business community or things that can be impacting the business community to our members and beyond. So who better to talk to on episode number 100 than the CEO of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce? So we appreciate your time today.
0:02:05 - (Steve Stivers): Great to be with you. And Findlay and Hancock county are a great place for business. I saw that for the 9th consecutive year, Hancock county and Findlay ranked first in business growth among 543 small cities nationwide, according to site selection magazine. So that's a heck of a record for Findlay and Hancock county. Great job, Doug.
0:02:30 - (C): Certainly something we're proud of. Let's start there, because in this time of business development, it's been a really interesting three to four years. We'll put it that way. But we do continue to see business growth here. But the one thing that I do hear concerns about from the business community that's already here is where are the employees going to come from? So let's start there on the state side. Where are we going to get the employees for this?
0:02:54 - (Steve Stivers): Well, there are a million and a half people, Doug, that grew up in Ohio that don't live here anymore. If they still lived here, we'd be closer to 15 million people in Ohio, and it would be a big deal. So we do need to kind of go back out and try to find some of those people, move for weather. They want palm trees and beaches or mountains. We're not going to have those things. But I will tell you, if you're sitting on the shore of Lake Erie, Doug, you wouldn't know we don't have an ocean. And if you're in the bottom of the Hawking Hills, you wouldn't know we don't have mountains. We have amazing geography.
0:03:29 - (Steve Stivers): We have incredible people, a great business climate. But we do need to go kind of bring some of those people back. And the other advantage we've got is we bring people to Ohio every year, Doug, to the University of Findlay and other schools. 600,000 college students. Between 600, 650,000 college students are in Ohio on any given year. Many of them come here from out of State. The problem is when they graduate, they leave.
0:03:59 - (Steve Stivers): And we need to keep some of those folks here. We keep about 88% of Ohioans that go to college here, but we don't do as well among out of state folks that come in to go to college. So we want to try to do something there. We're working to create a model in the country of an internship pairing program. Indiana has one, but it's not done to scale. They only scale. About 1000 college students get paired with Indiana businesses.
0:04:28 - (Steve Stivers): Our goal is to scale 10,000 college students a year with college students, with Ohio businesses, Ohio employers to do an internship. We think more of those students will stay in Ohio because they'll develop a relationship, potentially get a job offer. And we're excited about that. The other thing that I had a really interesting conversation with the HR director for Nationwide Insurance yesterday, telling me that they're really doing interesting project getting into sort of underemployed communities.
0:05:07 - (Steve Stivers): They worked in veterans communities early, and that's become less of an underemployed group than it was five or seven years ago. Now they're in the disability community with people that are blind, with people that have other disabilities. They use adaptive technology to help them work, and they've made a major push lately into the autism community. And he said one of his data scientists is a gentleman with autism.
0:05:40 - (Steve Stivers): The guy's making about $100,000 a year, and they've used some adaptive technology, but they've also allowed him to work from home, where some of the emotional things that might have affected him on the autism spectrum, like interacting with new people, dealing with the lunchroom, transportation, dealing with a bus line, coming downtown, he doesn't have to deal with any of that. He's one of the most productive workers that they have.
0:06:07 - (Steve Stivers): And he just used this example because he said that guy's making 100 grand a year and before he couldn't keep a job. So we do have to go to those second chance folks that have been in prison and especially if they're nonviolent and say, let's give you a second chance. We need to go to the disability communities. We need to go to folks that have been underemployed. And the other big well of talent, Doug, that we're not talking about enough is retired people and getting them to come back to work part time.
0:06:40 - (Steve Stivers): Many of them have the skills already as their 401k has become a 201 with the bad investment results the last couple of years ago. Last year was pretty good. Some of them are looking to do that, but it also is good for their social and emotional well being that they have interaction at work, even if they only do it one or two days a week. And the key there is going to be getting one or two people to share a job.
0:07:09 - (Steve Stivers): So you get five days of work out of maybe two people, one working three, one working two, or some other combination. So those are some of the places that we have to go to find talent. We want to keep more people here. We want to attract more people here, and we need to go to those.
0:07:26 - (C): Underserved communities, Doug, a lot to work with there. Let's start with the retirees, because we've.
0:07:31 - (Doug Jenkins): Covered this on the podcast here before.
0:07:33 - (C): Too, where, like you said, they're coming back into the workforce not only because maybe they want to make a little extra money, but also they miss the social aspect of it. What have your conversations with businesses around the state been about? Sort of reformatting those jobs so that two or three people end up doing the work of one person.
0:07:51 - (Steve Stivers): So we've had a lot of conversations with the Society for Human Resources manager Sherm about this kind of reimagining work and dividing jobs so they can be provided by a couple of people. Maybe they share a cube or they work from home, but they share the days and all the work gets done. It's easy and it's hard. It's easy to think about, but it's sometimes hard to do the details of making it happen. That's why we've had an ongoing conversation with Sherm about how do we help facilitate that and make it easy for medium and small size businesses to figure that out?
0:08:37 - (Steve Stivers): Because bigger businesses have the resources to sort of divide a job into two and figure out how to make it happen. And small businesses, many of them, unless this kind of happens on them, aren't probably planning that way. So we're trying to implant the idea in more small and medium sized businesses and then get them the support with professionals like Sherm that can help them do the things they need to do.
0:09:04 - (Steve Stivers): To divide up that job responsibility into two jobs.
0:09:07 - (C): Feels like this is a way to also get high school kids back into the workforce. I know prior to Covid, I think high school jobs were probably at an all time low. With kids as busy as they are and businesses again needing that, hey, we need this person here these times. And I think you're starting to see flexibility in that, which has the offshoot of now you're interested kids into the local business, you're getting kids into the local business community, and they're learning those soft skills in high school, kind of like you or I did.
0:09:36 - (Steve Stivers): That's 100% the right focus, and we need to encourage that and support that and enable it in every way we can. One of the biggest threat to it is going to be on the ballot this November, Doug, and that's raising the minimum wage. I mean, we have an indexed minimum wage. It went up 3.2% in January of this year. It goes up every year, and it's significantly higher than the federal minimum wage. I think our minimum wage, it might be ten point $13.
0:10:10 - (Steve Stivers): I used to have the old one memorized, but it's significantly higher than the federal minimum wage. And if that goes up to $15 an hour like the advocates want it to, it's really going to affect teen employment, first time employment, training employment, and it's going to cause some jobs that can be automated to be automated, and then people will lose that chance to gain soft skills and it's going to be those folks that I talked about earlier, the folks that have second chance issues, that somebody needs to give them a second chance or it's their first job and they're a teenager, and some of those jobs will be automated away if this happens. So it's a real shame if that happens. And I think a lot of voters think, oh, we want to give people a raise, but they don't realize that they're going to result in having fewer overall minimum wage jobs, which means less training opportunities for our teens and a lot of other folks. So it is a real threat to that opportunity.
0:11:14 - (Steve Stivers): But I think you're right. And Doug, I think we should start it even as early as possible. The pairing matching mechanism we talked about for college students with internships. Our next plan, after we scale it up to 10,000, 20,000, is to take it down into high school jobs and get those non college bound 9th graders, 10th graders, 11th graders. You just have to be over 14 years old to then get an internship for the summer to meet an employer when they're a freshman, and they can do that again when they're a sophomore with maybe another employer. Then by the time they're a senior, they will have had three employers they've met even before they graduate from high school.
0:12:02 - (Steve Stivers): And if we start in 8th grade, there'd be four. So it's an exciting opportunity to let people explore that, even if they're not going to do it through the whole school year. But just during the summer, I want to come back.
0:12:14 - (C): You mentioned automation and AI, and certainly that's something that businesses have talked to us here in Finland, Hancock county. But I want to wrap up on just talking about workforce. One of the things you mentioned was keeping out of state college students in Ohio, which I think is a really good idea. It kind of jives with conversations we've been having in Finland. Hancock county is how do we attract young professionals to a smaller city, a top micropolitan?
0:12:41 - (C): What would your advice to cities be and to municipalities be when it comes to this subject? Because there can be some consternation when it comes to, hey, we're only gearing things towards young professionals. We're not thinking about everything. I'm curious where you come down on.
0:12:55 - (Steve Stivers): I think, I think it's important to gear toward those young professionals because they're the ones making the choice of where do I want to, you know, Findlay's got some really cool things. You've got a great sushi restaurant for a middle sized town. It might be the best sushi restaurant I've been to in a middle sized town anywhere in America. You've got the Hancock Inn, you've got lots of cool outdoor bars and restaurants that are fun and interesting.
0:13:25 - (Steve Stivers): You've got the university, you've know the Blanchard river. You've got some cool things to do, which I think you've got a lot to market. And a lot of communities in Ohio have those same advantages. They just need to think about how they're going to do. You know, it's not just young professionals, because the other thing that we think, and we've been talking with jobs Ohio about this brand new strategy that jobs Ohio is rolling out where they'll give a company money to try to recruit people from outside Ohio to move here to take jobs.
0:14:01 - (Steve Stivers): And they give the money to the company so the company can either pass it along to the employee or use it to subsidize some of the expenses or do some other things. No other program in the country gives the money to the company and lets them decide how to use it best. And I think that is going to end up being a real Differentiator in a positive way because our corporate community understands they're going to need to pass some of that money on to the indiVidual, but it can help them do some things to find out who might be eligible or have the skills they need that they can get to move to Ohio. So I'm really excited about what that program is going to do to getting people thinking about moving to Ohio. And I talked about the million and a Half people that grew up here that don't live here anymore.
0:14:48 - (Steve Stivers): Over a million of them are still in the working age cohort of 18 to 65. And if there are times in those people's lives that I think it makes sense for them to look at moving as they have aging parents coming back to look at those, or as they have children younger in life. Ohio is a great place to raise kids, so they're great opportune times to reach out to those folks. And we need to work on the big data to help jobs Ohio and other partners reach out to a lot of those folks and let companies know, oh, here's some people that have skills in your industry that grew up in Ohio that don't live here anymore. And we think they're in the right sort of timeframe in their life that they might be open to a relocation.
0:15:35 - (C): Let's talk a little bit about automation and AI. Like we said, that's certainly a topic that's not going anywhere. It's going to increase. I would say anecdotally from my experience, it feels like the AI that we're using right now is not replacing jobs per se, other than taking the jobs that companies were never going to hire for anyway. My wife has said that she feels like Chat GPT is like an intern for her. She gives it an idea, and then it comes back with a rudimentary idea, and then she builds from that type of thing. But when you talk to businesses about how they're using automation and AI, what are the concerns you're hearing, and what are some of the use cases that you're seeing?
0:16:13 - (Steve Stivers): Well, we're hearing a lot about using AI. So I was talking to a big financial services company that said, when you're doing a chat with their company, nine times out of ten, you start with a chat bot. An AI chat bot, you're not actually talking to a person unless it needs to be elevated to a person. And it sort of knows when it's gone beyond something it can do, and then it transfers it to a live person.
0:16:41 - (Steve Stivers): So it's that customer service piece that really is being used now. The other thing is, AI makes every worker more productive. You already talked about how your wife uses it. I started my army retirement speech last may on Chat GPT, I said, write me a retirement speech, and it wrote the guts of it, and I personalized it and made it more meaningful and added the people who'd impacted my career. But it was the nice bones of a speech, and it made me a lot more productive.
0:17:14 - (Steve Stivers): So it is a very technology that increases productivity, which I think is going to increase, although I will say as AI advances, it will make it to the point that it automates some jobs. If I was a underwriter at an insurance company or a loan processor at a bank, I would be worried that in the next three to five years, there's going to be some advances in AI that would even architects and some of those things that are creative but mostly mundane.
0:17:54 - (Steve Stivers): That's where I think you'll see a lot of technology augmentation. And we need to get ahead of that. We need to help those folks as we start to see things moving that direction. We need to, as a state, create some workforce development programs to make sure that the people who are currently doing those jobs can get some education so they can do some other job and not be displaced or unemployed by the technological innovation that's coming.
0:18:25 - (Steve Stivers): We started with the fact that we don't have enough workers. Today, as we sit here, Doug, there are more open positions in Ohio than unemployed people in Ohio. So a little automation is not going to be the end of the world as long as we look after the people that are displaced, give them some support and help to make sure they're trained to do something that they can keep doing. And we're going to need to lean into that a little bit.
0:18:49 - (Steve Stivers): But I'm excited about the future and how much more productive we're going to be. Think about all the things that America couldn't compete in because our labor costs were so much higher than the rest of the world. As we move toward automation and augmented intelligence and artificial intelligence, some of that labor cost is going to come down. We'll be able to compete in things we couldn't compete in, manufacturing and other things.
0:19:18 - (Steve Stivers): It's going to be exciting. And that means more jobs and opportunity and wealth and companies will move back to the United States from other countries. And that's an exciting that continued reshoring that we're seeing with intel and we're seeing with a lot of other manufacturing is an amazing opportunity for northwest Ohio. The biggest concentration of manufacturing in Ohio is straight down the 75 corridor running right through Findlay, Ohio.
0:19:48 - (Steve Stivers): And I think that reshoring of jobs is going to continue, but it's going to need that automation to make it work. But it's going to create opportunity for everybody. And I'm super excited about what that means for the whole state of Ohio. But I'm really excited for what it means for northwest Ohio.
0:20:07 - (Doug Jenkins): Absolutely.
0:20:08 - (C): I've got two more questions for you, if you have time.
0:20:11 - (Steve Stivers): I want to go back.
0:20:13 - (Doug Jenkins): No, no, I appreciate the answers. I do want to go back to.
0:20:16 - (C): Workforce because we've talked a little bit about the young professionals. We've talked about retirees, things like that. One thing that does get brought up in this arena is immigration and how that works. Certainly we can get into federal immigration policy. We'll be here all day, and we don't have time for that. But for people that are here and have, I guess, where is the Ohio chamber of commerce on this? What are some of the things that you're seeing and the stance that's been taken there?
0:20:45 - (Steve Stivers): Well, we support immigration, legal immigration. We do think that America should change our policies to be like Canada and use merit based immigration so that the people that move to the top of the list are the people who can fill the jobs that are unfilled, that we need filled. We think that would be a very pro growth immigration policy and still not take away the land of opportunity that America has always been.
0:21:14 - (Steve Stivers): And I will tell you that in the last few years, we've changed our focus to intra state immigration as opposed to international immigration. Because I served in Congress for twelve years and I know that immigration reform does not appear to be going anywhere very quickly, unfortunately, in Washington. So that's why we focus on the million and a half people that grew up in Ohio that don't live here anymore. And we have that figure and we know who some of those people are, and we're researching them to make sure we know where they are in their life cycle and whether they might be in a place where they could be recruited back to Ohio.
0:21:53 - (Steve Stivers): And so that's been our focus as opposed to international immigration. But I will tell you, if we don't figure out international immigration in the next decade, America's economic growth is going to suffer for it because we have and will continue to have, even with automation, opportunities that go unfilled in certain sectors, even if we start having a situation where we don't have more open jobs than unemployed people, because in the tech sector, especially engineers, information architects, all that kind of thing, we just aren't producing enough of them.
0:22:36 - (Steve Stivers): And frankly, we need to get more of them to come here and move here internationally, and it'll help our growth. And if we don't figure that out, I think it's going to negatively impact America's growth in every part of America, including Ohio and including Findlay, Ohio. So we're going to continue to advocate for international immigration and hope that our republican and democratic elected officials in Washington can be courageous and do what's right for America's economy.
0:23:09 - (Steve Stivers): And they can do that with protections. But we need to support economic growth and opportunity for everybody. And if we don't, it'll put a governor on our economic growth.
0:23:21 - (C): I agree. I remember growing up in high school, my history teacher had, I don't know, I can't remember who said the quote, but it's always stuck with me. Had it up on his bulletin board. Whatever it says, the business of America is business. And I've always thought, well, that makes a lot of sense. And it kind of goes in line with what you're talking about there. If we take a business case to this, we can probably figure it out once we stop yelling at each other.
0:23:44 - (Steve Stivers): I suppose that's right. And I love that quote. Maybe that's why you and I love that quote. Maybe that's why we work at chambers of commerce.
0:23:53 - (C): You know who said it? I can never remember who said it.
0:23:56 - (Steve Stivers): But I love that quote, and it's true.
0:23:58 - (Doug Jenkins): So last question for you.
0:24:00 - (C): I always love to end on a positive note.
0:24:02 - (Doug Jenkins): What excites you about business in Ohio.
0:24:03 - (C): For the rest of this know, I.
0:24:07 - (Steve Stivers): Am really excited for Ohio's economic trajectory. When I see announcements like intel coming here and announcements like Amgen coming here and HoNda building a giant battery plant here and Ford building a giant battery plant here, it gets me really excited. But the other thing that gets me excited is the innovation I see in the small business space. Whether I'm in Findlay or whether I was in Ironton yesterday meeting with some small businesses down on the river, there is innovation going on in small business all around this state.
0:24:45 - (Steve Stivers): Small business is still the driver of our economy, but it's exciting to see some of the reshoring and what we're getting out of our small businesses. So I think Ohio's future is going to be bright. We've got some challenges with workforce, we also have some challenges with regulation and taxation that we have to figure out how to bring in enough revenue but not actually stifle economic growth. And if we figure those things out, I'm really confident that this next decade is going to be one of our golden decades in the Ohio economy and the american economy. So it's a really exciting time with reshoring, with innovation, with artificial intelligence, but it's going to be very dynamic and we've got to be responsive and smart in the way we help support that economic growth. But I'm really excited about where we are and where we're headed.
0:25:37 - (Doug Jenkins): Well, Steve, we appreciate your time today. Thanks for being guest number 100.
0:25:41 - (Steve Stivers): Doug, it's great to be on and thank you so much and have a great day in Findlay, and we'll look forward to seeing you up there soon.
0:25:50 - (Doug Jenkins): Thanks again to Steve Stivers for joining us for episode 100. It's great to hear about some of the ideas being put together to help out OhiO businesses and bring workers back to the state. Of course, it's a topic we'll continue to follow here on chamber amplified, as well as in the e newsletter and everything else we're doing here at the Chamber of Commerce. With that said, Chamber Amplified is a free podcast for the community, thanks to the investment of members from the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce.
0:26:14 - (Doug Jenkins): Because of our robust membership, we're able to focus on providing timely information to the Findlay and Hancock county business community, run leadership programs for adults and teenagers, and be an advocate for the area while also providing tools to help local businesses succeed. Now, if that sounds like something you'd be interested in being a part of. Just let me know. We can talk about how an investment in the chamber helps strengthen the entire community.
0:26:35 - (Doug Jenkins): That'll do it for this week's episode. If you have any ideas for topics that we should cover on future episodes, just send me an email. Djenkins@Findlayhancockchamber.com remember, if you're listening on our website, you can also make this a lot easier on yourself. Just go to your favorite podcast player. Search for Chamber amplified. Hit subscribe. You're all set. Every episode will come to you each and every Friday.
0:26:57 - (Doug Jenkins): Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time on chamber amplified from the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce.