Paul Szmal: We're joined now by Jeff Shipley from the Seneca County Chamber of Commerce and Discover Seneca. Good morning Jeff, welcome back.
Guest: Good morning Paul, thanks for having me.
Paul Szmal: We have a lot to talk about this time around, starting with a couple of the linchpin events that happen every year for the Seneca County Chamber of Commerce. The first one is going to be the Annual Membership Celebration and Small Business Awards. This isn't too far away, it's July 15th.
Guest: No, coming up right around the corner. We have such a great time with this event. As you mentioned, it's one of the components to it is our Small Business Award. So July 15th is when the event is. It's going to be at Seneca Lake Resorts, a beautiful property overlooking Seneca Lake down by Sampson State Park. And we've done this the last few years where we give out Small Business Awards. This is such a great opportunity to recognize some of the businesses in our community that do just a fantastic job each and every day. And it's a great way for our community to reward and honor them. And so we are in the final stages of that particular competition. We're going to be releasing that to our membership community to vote through our social media channels and our website. So stay tuned for that. But we always have a great time with the Annual Membership Celebration and Small Business Awards. And it's not too early to talk about the next event because, like I said, this is another linchpin of the Chamber of Commerce calendar. It's the Annual Chamber Golf Tournament, August 14th, the day for it this year.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, and it's shaping up to be a really spectacular event. I think we have, the last I checked, already a third of the teams are already in. So that's really good for us at this time of year. It just goes to show everyone's anxious to get out on the golf course and do a little bit of networking and have a really fun day with our very active Chamber membership community. That one is going to be August 14th, as you said, at Silver Creek, or I'm sorry, at Seneca Falls Country Club out in Seneca Falls. We're looking forward to giving back to the Country Club there in Seneca Falls. And, you know, our event has evolved throughout the years. We've really had a lot of fun with it. And this is not an intimidating event for, by any means, for anyone that does not know how to golf. This is just an opportunity for you and your business to get some exposure, to get some networking, maybe strike up a strategic partnership alliance or two, and just enjoy a really productive afternoon on the golf course. And I know there's a saying out there, a good day on the golf course is a better day than in the office, no matter what the weather is. So it's just a really great time, and we're looking forward to another round of golf at our annual golf tournament.
Guest: Yeah, if you've never played in one of these golf tournaments, most of them, and I believe, Jeff, yours is the same. It's a four-person best ball format.
Paul Szmal: That's right. Ours is the same. So you have three other teammates with you to make good shots, bad shots, all in between. There is no pressure. It's just a really fun time. And here's the other thing. It's a great way to get introduced to the sport of golf if you've never played, because there's a lot of people that have fun at these. This is an event to have fun at, not so much keep track of the scorecard. And by the way, there is a brand new Seneca County Chamber of Commerce website. I was looking over it earlier this morning. It looks really good, man.
Guest: Thank you. Really appreciate it. We worked, our team did a lot of work on that. They worked so hard on getting that ready. A lot of great features on it. We're really excited about some of the features. It really helps position our membership and our community in the best light possible. And that's really what we're all about. We're trying to bring maximum exposure to our area, encourage economic development, encourage growth, and really raise awareness for the businesses that make this community go. And so we have features like the job board, which has been all new. It's been reworked, made a lot easier for our members to be able to post jobs and get their jobs listed and featured. We have a lot of different options on the site to find more information about our upcoming events, like the chamber golf tournament or that membership celebration, small business award. So a lot of great features. It's a really good tool. There's a lot more that's going to be added to the site. So stay tuned for that too, but just a great way to connect with our community.
Paul Szmal: I wanted to follow up on something that we talked about last month, which is the chamber working on an AP course for local schools that provide students business leadership and personal finance skills. I understand there's going to be a special presentation on this Thursday.
Guest: This Thursday at 10 o'clock, it's a virtual session. So you can join from the comfort of your own office or your computer or your phone, if that's how you do it. But a virtual session, we're going to be joined by a member of the college board who's worked with us and our partners to design and develop this course. And we really are looking right now for business support letters, businesses that support this concept to give us that ability to then take it forward to our local school districts. And Paul, one really important thing is this is not just a Seneca County project. We are launching this across the state. We're one of 10 chambers in the state that is helping to raise awareness for this and hopefully launch it in school districts all over our community. So whether you're in the Geneva school district, the Auburn school district, or the Seneca Falls school district, we would love to have your input and your hopefully support for this. As we talked about the last time, it is an AP business principles and personal finance course. It's something that students will learn different aspects of business and how personal finance is woven into that is also really exciting to me. Students get a better sense of key business and leadership skills, whether it's entrepreneurship or decision-making, communication. And they also, as we talked about, will develop these personal finance skills. It's something that we're hearing an awful lot about from our business community that the candidates that are coming to them for these job openings just are falling short on some really critical skills. So here's an opportunity to bring these personal savings and borrowing ideas and principles into the classroom and really equip these students with the knowledge not only to go on and maybe earn college credit, but also a credential that they can then take forward and really improve their candidacy for a local job opportunity. We think it's a really great idea and course, and we're really in the mode right now of trying to get business support behind this. And so that's why the Thursday session is so important that anybody that's interested, you don't even have to be a member of the Chamber of Commerce, jump onto this call. It's not a very long call, 10 o'clock in the morning. We're going to put more information on our website, SenecaChamber.org, so you'll have all the key information. But jump on, learn a little bit about it, and if you are supportive of this, if you can get behind this, we'd really love to get a letter of support or some sort of indication of support so we can bring this forward to our local school districts.
Paul Szmal: Jeff Shipley with us here on FLX Morning on Finger Lakes News Radio. And Jeff, I'm going to have you put the Discover Seneca hat on here. A couple of items to talk about, including the construction beginning on a brand new Seneca County Welcome Center.
Guest: Yeah, I think people that have driven by on the corner of 318 and 414 entire have noticed in the last couple of days or week that there is a shell going up right now. It looks like it's taking hold. There's a building going up. It's going to be a welcome center. It's going to be a welcome center for our community. We think it's a very good location. It's right off the New York State Thruway exit 41. There's a lot of traffic. It's the most trafficked portion of people entering Seneca County, so we know that it's a good location in terms of traffic. But it's going to be much more than that, Paul. It's going to house our Chamber Foundation staff, our Chamber staff. It's going to be able to showcase our business community along with our tourism community and the artists and the many wonderful food and craft beverage businesses that we have. We're hoping that we can have a really nice landscaped ground so we can bring something like a farmer's market of that sort of thing and a community center. We've got opportunities for just local organizations or the community at large to use our meeting room for example. This is a really convenient stop, a really convenient place right in a very busy intersection and we can think of any place better to showcase what we have in our community than a welcome center. So yeah, it's going up. It's taking shape. We're really excited about it. It's been a long time in the making. 3,200 square foot facility and we couldn't be more proud. Looking forward to the day when the official ribbon cutting happens for that one.
Paul Szmal: In addition to the recently redone discoversenica.com website, there are some new tourism initiatives that have been launched.
Guest: Yeah, we're so excited about all of the programming that we've unveiled and launched really for this year. Starting with that website, as you mentioned, we have a new visitor guide that has just been flying off shelves. We have distribution contracts throughout the east coast and we get reports on how effective that piece has been going off the shelves and other information centers from basically Maine to Maryland. So we're really excited about the performance of that. We've got a lot of exciting tools like a mobile app that you can use while you're navigating your way through our community from a tourism perspective. It's really all about getting the awareness out to visitors and really help strengthening that visitor economy that's so critically important to our area here. And so there's so many really great initiatives that have launched around that. And also I will point out that we're coming into the 4th of July and America 250 is taking center stage and we are so proud of all the work that we've done from an America 250 standpoint. We've got 10 different stories featured in our website and our visitor guide about ways that Seneca County has influenced or helped shape our nation in the theme of America 250. I'd encourage everybody to go check those out because it's been really fun and exciting to uncover all of those stories or maybe dust off some of the work that we've done in the past so we can bring that story forward. And so there's so much that we have to be thankful and grateful about where we live but and now it's just about trying to get that message out to our greater community at large.
Paul Szmal: And speaking of America 250 events if you go to that website discoversenica.com scroll down a little bit to featured events you'll find out about the Seneca Falls Canal Fest that is coming up July 3rd 4th and 5th. So discoversenica.com for the tourism side and for the brand new chamber website it's senecachamber.org. Jeff as always we appreciate having you on board.
Guest: Thank you sir.
Paul Szmal: Thank you Paul.
