This is a bit off topic from our usual posts but the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce, you know the one that is supposed to promote local business, is somehow doing this by……outsourcing its website design and development to India? In a move that could only be done by this Chamber, they are actually encouraging their members to do so as well!
We made the foolish mistake of joining the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce last year and almost instantly knew that we should have just given the money to a deserving charity instead of paying the membership fee. That’s fine - we gave away a few bucks but learned a lesson.
As with anything you sign up for, we were bombarded with solicitations from businesses associated with the chamber. One such company peaked our interest as they were pitching the whole ‘free web site’ deal - they must land some pretty good clients with that. Anyways, we are in the business….so we looked into it a bit and saw that this company was plastered all over Chamber collateral and the Chamber website. Digging deeper the Chamber became even more laughable as this ‘local’ company is just a front for a company in India. Now I will never ever question or insult a company’s business model. If a company wants to outsource - that’s fine and it’s their right to do so. There is a market for less expensive, low quality work and they fill the niche.
I have absolutely no problem with the company, but how in the hell does the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce working with and actively promoting a company that blatantly outsources work to India help the local economy? Aren’t Chambers supposed to support and encourage the growth of the local economy? I posed this question to numerous staff members via email and phone messages but found them to be as ineffective as the Chamber itself. I even got in contact with the ‘President’ - and still nothing. I tried to get my membership fee back purely out of principle but apparently I am required to attend at least one each of their excruciating event series prior to being compensated with another, yet ‘free’, useless year of membership.
But shouldn’t the Chamber be actively promoting new business, and new types of business in its local community - something like having a local St. Pete company design and develop the Chamber website would be a nice start. St. Pete’s big brother Tampa did it and they enlisted a very qualified, skilled, local Tampa company to do it…and I am sure that there would be companies willing to do so (ours not being one) for St. Pete just to get the exposure. The current Chamber site doesn’t even provide members an indexable link…..and the site is really, really bad - but that’s besides the point.
Not all Chambers follow the misguided path of good old St. Pete. If you are a local business in the Tampa Bay area and are looking to get involved with a Chamber, join the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce. They have much more relevant events, a more diverse membership and they actually seem to care about the local economy and the businesses that the Chamber serves.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
too funny! the chamber should be ashamed…i have had very similar experiences with the chamber (the them being useless part). if you are actually considering giving away your membership fee to charity….i could use the money
great job exposing them!
Agreed with Kathy C above - the chamber should be ashamed. The chamber encourages their members to use local businesses - and then they do this. Shameful. Great job to GD for spreading the word.
HA! Not sure where cg road is but I’m sure it’s beautiful there. From DTI’s contact page, it appears that they perform website maintenance with a video game controller….can that be?
Really just a matter of not doing their homework. They actually contracted local firm JCTWeb, who I think did the website pro bono in exchange for free advertising on the site (indefinitely, I guess). JCT Web, via their RapidVector platform, outsource most of their work to their “team” in India.
That said, John Tuncer, who owns JCTWeb, is actually a pretty nice guy.
So, still a big FAIL for the Chamber, but not quite as bad is if they had known full well what they were getting into.
I have absolutely no problem at all with JCTWeb or John Tuncer, who is most likely a great guy. I would never degrade another person’s business model.
You would have to think, however, that the Chamber would perform at least some due diligence in making sure something like this wouldn’t happen. It took me less than five minutes to find out that JCTWeb outsources most of their work.
What’s done is done, but when I approached the Chamber about this they were very unresponsive. When this was brought to light, couldn’t they have had some discussion about making sure that this doesn’t happen going forward? Maybe reviewing their vendor qualification process? Perhaps that’s just too much work for them.
Shame on the chamber and shame on JCT web. Tampa / St. Pete is a small market. News travels fast. I’ll do my part in spreading the news.