Harrison Blair, president and CEO of the Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce, talked with Invest: about the industries he would like to see more of in the region, how the FIFA World Cup is going to bring opportunities for vendors and other businesses and the Chamber’s efforts toward a guaranteed pool fund that will let businesses be seen as less of a risk to banks.
What are some industries you would like to see grow in the area?
Artificial intelligence is one area. There are so many opportunities and so many different applications that you can now attach to AI. There’s a ton of growth there. Real estate is another sector that offers opportunities. We’ve started talking about various programs with the city of Dallas and implementing partnerships with the Real Estate Council, which will help growing and budding Black developers really access capital funds. These are industries where there are people waiting to help them grow. The industries that we are already capitalizing on include food service, which is low overhead to get in. I wouldn’t advise it but some people have started making dishes in their kitchen and selling them. As a result, we’re thinking about the need for commercial kitchens. If you look at a map and see commissary kitchens or commercial kitchens, there are not many of them in the southern sector. This is crazy, especially for us. We’re down the street from the world’s greatest food incubator, the State Fair. They fry everything. And it’s really difficult for a lot of the small businesses that want to break into the Fair because there’s no commissary kitchen for them to prepare food. If you’re in food service, the State Fair is now trying to talk to you. They’re expanding, they’re redeveloping Fair Park and they’re updating almost 200-year-old buildings. Another great industry to be in is construction. Dallas is about construction, architecture and any kind of white-collar service that deals with building new facilities. Hopefully, in 2024, we will break ground on an 800,000-square-foot facility that will be our new convention center. That’s going to be $4 billion spent over the next 10 years. A lot of the firms that we work with are trying to get a piece of those contracts. Finally, we’ve worked with 50 firms in the last year that have cool product-based businesses that are about to scale. Dallas is also about to host the FIFA World Cup, with some of the games played here. One FIFA World Cup match is worth a Super Bowl. We have secured eight of those. That will be a great opportunity for vendors.
What progress has been made in workforce development to fulfill demand for the new businesses in the region?
That is an area that still needs a lot of help. Workforce development is so critical because everybody’s focused on how to get Texas Instruments. Everybody’s concerned about how quickly Toyota can make a new vehicle or how many employees McCarthy needs to build some new structure. But nobody’s asking about that small coffee shop that’s struggling to keep eight employees. Where will they get more hospitality workers? That is more difficult to figure out because you have thousands of firms that may hire 10 people. Most workforce development organizations are built to help those big corporations and big firms. We are thinking about how we can help small businesses do this. This is critical when you look at the fact that 25% of the small businesses that make up Dallas are minority-owned and they need a lot of employees. Tradeline partnerships use the Chamber as a hub. Within that, our members will do the training that will help us get enough workforce ready for some of our bigger clients.
How has the role of chambers evolved and what does it mean to be a chamber of the future?
The chamber has evolved from just doing in-person events. A lot of members want to share who they are and what they do, and they want to do it from the lecture series. That’s something that we’ve started to really understand. Also, we do a lot of hybrid events. There’s no way you can do an event and not have a camera there. If you didn’t film it, it didn’t happen. Often, people who can’t make the event in person want to access it later. People will go back just to watch our programs, just to watch Power Breakfast happen. Who was in the room? Who stepped in front of the camera? Who got up and shared what they do? Who can I utilize? That’s a key service for us. Then you must provide some kind of actual value or ROI from every event. You need to have partners there who are funding. We need to have a lot more participation from a grassroots level. We get a lot of our funding directly from members. So it’s important for them to really see us as viable and for us to move up in terms of importance on that balance sheet when it’s time to start making bill payments. When you talk about what chambers do, to me, a chamber of commerce is really infrastructure, like a road or a sidewalk or a freeway.
What are some of the projects or initiatives you are excited to push forward for the Chamber?
We have been working on a guaranteed pool fund for three years. This fund is basically big corporations, and municipalities, like Dallas County, that believe racism is a public health crisis. We want them to invest in a pool fund, which won’t go directly to businesses but the guarantee can be used to make sure that banks see these businesses as less of a credit risk. When they walk into the bank, they have a guarantor already signed off for the amount that they may need. That’s a big initiative that we’re very excited to push forward.
We also pledge that wherever we decide to make a project happen, we’re going to go talk to the community. I want to know what they want to use. We need to know, of course, what will make a profit, but what will they use? How will it impact their community? And who can we bring in? Those are the questions we want to discuss with communities.
