The Greater Bentonville Chamber of Commerce recently laid off three employees — about half its staff — due to financial difficulties.

With approximately 1,000 member businesses, the chamber provides networking, events and advocacy for the local business community. 

Now staffed by four full-time employees, the chamber plans to continue its mission, but with dramatic changes to just about every aspect of the organization.

Revenue Declines

In conversations with The Bentonville Bulletin, Brandom Gengelbach, who became chamber president and CEO in October 2023, was forthcoming about the financial challenges the membership-based nonprofit organization experienced.

He described a membership roster that has declined over the past few years, with trouble dating back to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Members who were unable to pay dues were kept on the books for years.

While staff remained hopeful that lapsed members would resume paying their dues, keeping non-paying members on the books painted a less accurate view of membership, and the chamber finally removed businesses that had not been paying last year. 

“We lost a lot of members last year that we had given the benefit of the doubt from a payment perspective,” Gengelbach said. 

After adjusting the roster, the chamber saw a 69% membership renewal rate last year — meaning about one-third of members were dropped. 

Membership dues and event/programming sponsorships are the chamber’s primary revenue sources, and both saw declines last year, along with grant funding.

“The grants were a little over 25% of the overall revenue piece, and the grants piece went away. So that’s created some challenges,” Gengelbach said.

Cash reserves covered payroll last year, but the shortfall amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“There was the hope to be able to remedy the loss last year, and we tried in a bunch of different ways, and it just didn’t happen,” Gengelbach said.

Toby Teeter, a member of the chamber’s board of directors, said the financial troubles started before Gengelbach, who was living in Texas at the time, joined the organization.

“Long story short is Brandom was hired in a time where he was kind of thrown under the bus,” Teeter said. “He moved here from Dallas — from Fort Worth, technically — and we thought we had a stable budget. He kind of walked in blind and a lot of things were in motion.”

Teeter also said the interim period between Gengelbach’s hiring and the departure of the organization’s last president in late 2021 contributed to the revenue decline.

“The revenue side has been in decline for several years because, quite frankly, it didn’t have a leadership … for almost two years between presidents,” Teeter said.

Looking Forward

The chamber is planning a major reboot, including rebranding and programming changes.

“Essentially, this is a complete reset of the organization,” Gengelbach said. “So we’ve been in this spot, which provides difficult decisions, but it also provides opportunities.”

Among the planned changes:

• A new name and logo, set to debut at the chamber’s annual meeting in April

• Updated membership levels and benefits, informed by focus groups held last year

• Revamped programming, including a small business summit, changes to the NWA Tech Summit and the WalStreet event series, and a weekly lunch for members

• A new economic development strategy, developed with an outside consulting firm

“At the end of the day, we have got to have very aggressive membership goals in terms of bringing on new members to be able to help meet our 2025 budget and beyond,” Gengelbach said. “And to make that happen, we have to up our game in terms of the membership, the value of our membership, and then the actual events and programming.”

With a leaner staff, he plans to lean on the chamber’s board and existing members.

“I think we’re going to be revisiting them in a deeper way to be able to say, ‘Okay, how can we leverage you to help drive membership? How can we leverage you to help contribute sponsorship, to host events, to do those types of things,’” he said.