A chat about business with Bill Christopher of the Chamber of Commerce

The Spy recently sat down with Bill Christopher, president of the Dorchester Chamber of Commerce, to discuss business in Cambridge, how it’s doing, and what can be done to improve it. (The interview has been edited for length.)

How does the Chamber work?

So, we are a membership organization. We’re not funded by government or anybody. We’re completely self-funded by our members. … We have about 483 businesses that are members and then about 35, 40 individuals that decided to be members of the Chamber as well. … Our charter is to provide support for our members to help grow and create a stronger business environment. So, we have a very active government affairs committee that works with local government, state, federal government, and that’s probably one of our strongest assets. … We do a lot of education for our members. Most of it’s free, we occasionally have to charge, but most of the stuff we do is free. And we will educate anywhere from how to use Outlook and Excel to how you develop 401Ks or retirement plans for your employees, or how to build a business plan or how to do marketing. … We work heavily with the local school systems, the public schools, Chesapeake College, we work with Junior Achievement [Maryland Business Roundtable for Education], we have a really strong education committee.

We do the standard things Chambers do. … We do ribbon cuttings, Business After Hours. That’s a lot of networking stuff. We do a lot of business-to-business introductions, so we know a lot about what businesses are doing here. And so we will do matchmaking, and we think it makes sense to connect this business with that business. … We’ll help [new businesses] create websites, we’ll help them with a marketing plan, we’ll review their business plans with them, we’ll look for holes in terms of if they haven’t thought through all the expenses they’re going to have or if their revenue projections took off, actually talk them through and help them get that through and we’ll help get them through the incubator process to get going to do that kind of stuff. We provide a lot of services especially for the not-for-profit community. So, we have about 75 not-for-profit members in that 483 members. And that’s probably more than most Chambers. … We do a lot of work with them, helping them with their mailings and getting things out the door. And we’ll do low-cost copies for them and no-cost copies of them and provide services that they need to be successful because we need those not-for-profits and community organizations to make the community stronger overall.

We have three-and-a-half paid employees. … And then the Board is a 17-member volunteer board. … But we think we provide good service for the community. … I think what else I should tell you about the Chamber, thanks to working with the bank, we occupy this building and then we sublease this building and so we actually have tenants that we think are very helpful to community. So, Cambridge Main Street is a tenant. [Small Business Development Center] is a tenant. So, you can come in here and get business advice. [Cambridge Waterfront Development, Inc] is a tenant. … And so there’s a kind of a one-stop shop for people coming in to get information from us here in the building. We have the conference room upstairs which is free to members to use. It was used 305 times last year.

We are mostly a behind-the-scenes, trying to do what we can. We work closely with county economic development, city economic development. There’s a business resource group that meets once a month that’s got representatives from the city, from the county, from ourselves, from SBDC, from Main Street. … Typically we meet monthly to talk about, you know, any businesses we know about that are in trouble. … If there’s new business trying to come, what can we do to convince them to come?

How is business in Cambridge going?

So, it’s up and down depending on who you talk to. The tourism this year was not, at least from my conversation with the businesses here, was not what it normally is. We just didn’t see the traffic that we normally see. The cruise ships came in. We will have had 26 cruise ships this year. … But beyond that the traffic was down from what we’re used to seeing. So, some of the businesses downtown have struggled more than they normally would because it’s hard for us to keep all those running with local–we really need tourism, and then sometimes we shoot ourselves in the foot with what we do on social media about how we bring tourism to the town or don’t bring it to the town. You know, we have a lot of events that are helpful in terms of bringing folks in and we need to do a better job of promoting those. You know, Ironman, Eagleman obviously do really well for bringing folks in. We have two boat races a year that are great for bringing in. We’ve got the Ice Festival now, this will be the fourth year for that. Main Street’s bringing back Taste [of Cambridge].

So, we’re bringing the traffic into downtown, the surrounding businesses. I mean, if you talk about Downtown as I’m talking about retail and restaurants, but other businesses, our manufacturing is still strong. You know, it’s basically kind of the heartbeat after agriculture and seafood for the county. … Our manufacturers are doing well, we have other manufacturing companies that are looking to locate here, which is good. You know, the folks talk about Woods Road being empty, but it’s not. Almost all those plants are full again, so there really isn’t any open factories sitting on Woods Road anymore. …

So, I’d say that that segment is healthy. Hyatt is doing, you know, as a resort can do, doing fairly well. I mean, they’re busy in the season. What we need to do is figure out how to help them in the off-season. … Emily’s [Produce] and Blackwater [National Wildlife Refuge], keeping those guys fed and getting more businesses like that to bring people into the community.

How many new businesses opened in Cambridge in 2024?

If I sat and thought about it for a minute, I could probably tell you exactly. I mean, we picked up 35 new members during the course of the year, but not all of those were newly opened. Some of those were existing businesses that just decided to join versus somebody new opening to join. … An example is Pleasant Day. [They] had their adult daycare. They just opened their childcare. So, that is a new business. But you would argue, is that a new business or is that a “spin up?”

But you know, so you have those kinds of things versus someone coming in and starting a brand-new business like Vintage 414 on Race Street. … And then the Pine Street Community Market opened up on Pine Street. I mean, that’s the first new construction business that’s opened there in 50 years. … And then you go outside the city, you got the Dollar General opened up on 16. … So, there are new businesses that have opened and new businesses are coming. … I mean, there’s positive signs everywhere, despite what the economy might be doing or people are saying about the economy. … In my opinion, there’s more positive than negative.

You mentioned about the tourism being down. There was a business owner in town who closed this year. And that person said that 2024 business was half of what 2023 business was. Is there any other reason besides the tourism that you can think of?

Well, I think the economy itself. I think people are somewhat nervous about what they’re spending. … Without tourism, I mean, we live in an environment where some people don’t like the fact that we have tourism. There are people that hate Ironman, which is still amazing to me. Brings $12 million into the economy and they’re in and out the weekend, but people hate the fact that they’re coming here is, you know, we need to embrace and encourage tourism in every way we possibly can. Because that’s money that comes in, it stays. … And without having those tourists walking up and down the street, stopping in the shops. I think that’s what you’re seeing, the people that are feeling that they just didn’t get that this year. I mean, we can see it here. We just didn’t have the traffic in our building. … So, people come in, they get their maps and their brochures and directions and ask where to eat and all that kind of stuff. And it was half this year what we’re normally seeing for us. So, I’m sure that’s what translated to what you’re going to see in the retail shops and the restaurants downtown.

What obstacles are there to opening a new business here?

Always funding, in terms of where you’re going to get the funding from to start a business. There are a lot of people that believe there’s a lot of free money out there and there really isn’t. But for a for-profit entity, picking the right product line or what you want to sell, you know, in terms of what you want to offer. Retail is just tough. People go online now. … You’ve really got to be able to create something that makes you a destination. I mean, the sports guy, [River Dogs Outfitters], the fact that he has kayaks and bikes and stuff in there makes [it] so you can go in and actually see and touch and feel the things. … But, you know, if you’re selling shirts or shoes, people are going to go online and buy it just because it’s quicker, easier, and likely cheaper.

We do a whole campaign about buying local because every dollar you spend local is going to do a whole lot more for the economy than going online. But that’s hard. … So, if anybody’s coming into the retail space, we do business plans with them. We encourage them to have an online presence as well as their bricks and mortar. And a lot of them will have stronger online than they will bricks and mortar. … So, they’ll shut the brick and mortar down because they can make more money by not having to pay rent and electricity and all the other things. And staffing is the other problem that’s been big, especially in the hospitality industry. Staffing for our restaurants has been a bigger problem than even customers. … And it wasn’t just limited to hospitality. Manufacturing was having the same problem. Everybody was. … In fact, most of the problems we’re talking about are not unique to Cambridge or Dorchester.

Why should someone open a business here?

If you look at the resources that we have here, natural resources, with the river, fishing, farming, quality of life, cost is a lot less. And if you compare our cost to what it will cost to open a business even locally, Easton or Salisbury, we’re going to be significantly less in terms of the cost to get it done. While I just talked about our workforce being problematic, we do have a fairly good workforce and we’re doing more to turn out a better one.

We have the local community college here, which a lot of folks don’t have. So, we have the ability to do some training there. We’ve got [Dorchester Career & Technology Center], which is turning out kids that are ready to be working and certified in certain areas like cosmetology or welding when they come out. So we have some advantages there. … Just looking at the environment here, property is less expensive. … There aren’t as many vacant buildings as there used to be. … So, there’s been a lot of investment in the community in terms of continuing to get it to grow forward.

Are you planning any events?

Well, we just had our golf tournament. We’ve got the Ice Festival coming up. That’ll be in January, so that’ll be a big event. We brought 8,000 people into downtown last year in one day. … We’ve got the powerboat races that we work with, with those guys that are Chamber type events. And then the standard events, you get Ironman, Eagleman, that’ll be happening again. … We do about 70 events a year total.