Linda Harris PROUD, THANKFUL — The Outgoing Jefferson County Chamber of Commerce President Tricia Maple-Damewood said she’s proud of what she was able to accomplish in her seven years at the helm, but “there’s a time to leave and this is my time…”
STEUBENVILLE — Come New Year’s Day, Tricia Maple-Damewood knows things are going to be a lot different.
After seven years of brainstorming ways to nurture small businesses in Jefferson County, she’s leaving her job as president of the Jefferson County Chamber of Commerce to focus on her family’s own business ventures — husband Dave’s company, Maple Manufacturing in Weirton; their first Airbnb, the Inn at Brandywine; and another they’re developing, Juanita’s Place, as well as doing marketing consults for a small list of clients.
“I still own two small businesses with my husband,” Maple said. “I really loved my job with the chamber, it was hard to leave, but I knew I had to get back to my businesses. I kind of took this job to keep us afloat and moving forward when we needed somebody, but I really did love doing it.”
Maple was chairman of the chamber board when she took the job as president.
“Nonprofits don’t have a big budget to pay people so it’s always tough,” she said. “We didn’t get a lot of applicants.”
She’d been involved with chambers of commerce before, and when she came back to Jefferson County in the 1990s served as membership coordinator for about five years. She also chaired the special events committee for about 10 years as a volunteer, working a lot on the golf outing, annual dinner and investor-to-investor trade fair. After that she served as board chair for two years before accepting the president’s job.
“Dave and I have always been small business owners, so it was always a good fit,” she said. “I’ve always been passionate about the chamber because I’ve always been a small business owner.”
As president, Maple said she “saw a lot of potential. I thought we could be doing a lot more, maybe be a little more trendy and more relevant.”
“I created a lot of the work, because me, the volunteers and staff were just so excited, just thinking of new things all the time, from little things like networking to things we’d never done before, like having a theme at our annual dinner. I was lucky to always have a staff that was passionate” about small business.
“When I started, I had two people new to the chamber world — Joy Grimm and Janet McLaughlin — and they were just as excited as I was, excited to get things extremely organized, extremely streamlined, and create a fun, informative, enjoyable chamber for our business community. It was a lot of work, but I like to think we got a lot done.”
Maple said she “honestly can’t say enough” about the two of them: Grimm started a couple of months after she did, McLaughlin was there when she took over but still relatively new.
“The three of us were determined to make the chamber fun and interesting and a useful business tool,” she added. “A lot of things still in place were born during those years.”
Because she’s a small business owner, Maple has always been extremely passionate about promoting “buy local and shop where you live.
“One of the things we’ve focused on is the whole ‘shift-your-shopping’ campaign, we’ve done so many events to educate people about how important it is to spend money locally,” Maple said. “We started a whole list of things that happen at the holidays — the receipt contest, Small Business Saturday activities, social media campaigns pertaining to holiday shopping, our parade float encouraging people to support the ‘Buy Local’ efforts.”
But buying local isn’t just important at the holidays, she said.
“Last year we launched ohiovalley.shopwhereilive.com (to) let our members sell online,” she said. “Often what happens in the small business community is they’re so busy running their businesses (they don’t have time to grow their own websites) so it’s a really big perk for a lot of our members. Even businesses that have their own website can put up a storefront with links to their site, it lets them put up a storefront and links to that site and shows the community what they have to offer. To me, Shop Where You Live is what the chamber is all about — it lets local businesses promote themselves easily, affordably and efficiently.”
She’s also proud of the workforce training and education committee they created, which brings together people from business and education “so that we can work on finding quality employees and getting students on the right career paths and ensuring that they can get the education and training that our local employers need.”
“The chamber board room was literally almost standing room only for some of these meetings pre-COVID and now we are back on track with one of our big goals being a countywide job fair in the fall of 2022,” she added.
Maple’s been working with the chamber’s next president, Kate Sedgmer, for the past month.
“It’s a really good transition, we think a lot alike,” Maple said. “But it’s like I’m handing my baby, my puppy, off to somebody. It’s tough, mostly because there was a lot we couldn’t get done before I left. I had a lot of ideas, but all you can do is tell yourself, ‘I did my best’ and hand it off. Obviously, the new person can do their thing. All you can do with a non-profit is leave it in a little better shape than you found it and hope the next person can build on what you got done, because you’re not going to have the same goals.”
Maple said she’s leaving Sedgmer with an organization that’s “very organized, and I’m proud of that, and, financially, it’s in good shape. I’d hand those two things off to anybody in any organization.”
But she admits she’s “really, really going to miss the people, the friendships and the business relationships, from the giant employers to the little mom-and-pops.”
“I still didn’t get everything done I wanted to get done,” she con cedes. “You just have to eventually pick a day and say, ‘I’m going to be done’ and walk away. I have a new idea every day of the week and that’s not good. There’s a time to leave and this is my time to leave.”