Southwest Flavor Ep. 156 - Amanda Wiggins, Mark Napier

**Ron Arenas** (0:00)
Good morning, everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to Southwest Flavor. I'm your host Ron Arenas, and today we have a great show for you. And our first guest is Amanda Wiggins with Marana Chamber of Commerce. Welcome.

**Amanda Wiggins** (0:11)
Hey, I'm really happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

**Ron Arenas** (0:14)
Thank you. It's been a couple of days in a row. We had the Marana breakfast yesterday, and so it's good to see you as always.

**Amanda Wiggins** (0:20)
Yes, thank you so much. Yes, Marana Mornings yesterday, and you are our sponsor, so thank you so much to Picture Rocks.

**Ron Arenas** (0:25)
Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate that. And that's always such a great event. I mean, there's so many people there, so many business owners, and just people throughout the community. The mayor's usually there, the town manager's there.

**Amanda Wiggins** (0:37)
It is. It's the first Wednesday of every month, so it kind of snuck up on us because it was July 1st this month. But yeah, it's a great opportunity for people to get in person and share about their business, their organization. Everyone gets 30 seconds, and we have such a good turnout. So many comments yesterday of new people who just were so impressed in saying wow, they were going to come back, and they were just taking notes the whole entire time, hearing everybody's 30 seconds. So that was really awesome.

**Ron Arenas** (1:06)
Very good. Very good. Yeah. And let's talk a little bit more about the Marana Chamber. Just tell us some history and...

**Amanda Wiggins** (1:13)
Yeah. So it's been such an honor. I've got to serve as the president and CEO for five years now.

**Ron Arenas** (1:20)
It's been five years already?

**Amanda Wiggins** (1:21)
Yes. This is my five-year anniversary this month. Oh, cool. Well, last month, June, was. So the Marana Chamber of Commerce, we exist to continue to make a thriving community through connected business leadership. One thing that we really understand is you can do what you do really well and just stay in your lane the whole entire time, but you can do what you do even better when you connect with others and you have a network of people that you can lean on and know more about your business, your organization, just as much as you know about theirs. And that's what we exist to do. So we have had like a trajectory of growth over the last five years that we have just been absolutely loving, appreciating, so grateful for that we get to serve our members every day.
About 830 members is what we get to represent.
All different types of businesses from large, medium, small, to really micro home-based businesses. And sometimes our home-based businesses are actually quite large, so in their impact and all of that. So we have a whole plethora of businesses we get to represent, and that's what we do. We're a staff of six team members that represent and work every day through events and programs, and just day-to-day operations of what it means to be a connector in this community.

**Ron Arenas** (2:42)
Fantastic. And like you said, that's just so important. I mean, you can have a great business, but if no one knows that you exist, then you're not going to make a living doing it.

**Amanda Wiggins** (2:53)
Right. Yeah. And you need others. You need services yourself. And so connecting with local people who are real and care about the community just makes it all that much better. So right.

**Ron Arenas** (3:06)
Anytime that you need services, like who am I going to call? Am I just going to Google it or I'm going to put it up on Facebook? A lot of people do that.

**Amanda Wiggins** (3:13)
Yeah.

**Ron Arenas** (3:14)
But I mean, if you get to know these other people, you actually get to know them. You get to know them on a personal basis and then you form that trust and you form that relationship with them.

**Amanda Wiggins** (3:24)
Yeah, absolutely. That's what we love to see.
Some of our members get to tell us testimonies of their experience. And that's some of the most fun parts of our job. It's such a challenge to capture those stories and we want to have the bandwidth to be able to do that and the skills to do that. But right now, it's something we just get to really enjoy. We do have our guest editor feature every week in our newsletter, so we hope that some of those stories come out. But we as a staff just get to hear every day before our staff meetings, we do a little mission moment of why we do what we do. And that's where we get to hear some of these stories that, you know, from true, you know, relationships that have, you know, either benefited them or further their community to actual dollars in the sense that they have seen directly into their business due to these connections.