When James O’Callaghan became the president and CEO of the Manhattan Beach Chamber of Commerce four years ago, the chamber had an unwieldy 30 member board, half of whom neither lived in nor owned a business in Manhattan. The chamber’s $225,000 in city funding was about to be cut off and unlike Hermosa Beach’s chamber, with its summer fiestas, and the Redondo chamber with its Super Bowl 10K, Manhattan’s chamber lacked signature events capable of financially sustaining itself. The Manhattan Beach Hometown Fair is not a chamber event.
“The chamber was more a social organization, rather than a business advocacy organization,” O’Callaghan said.
His instructions from the chamber board, when he was hired away from the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, were to make the chamber solvent and responsive to local businesses.
When O’Callahan leaves Manhattan Beach next week to head the Huntington Beach Chamber of Commerce, his successor will inherit a chamber that is barely recognizable from the 2012 chamber.
One of O’Callaghan’s first steps was to halve the board to 14 members, all vested in Manhattan businesses. Then he created four annual, business-oriented, money-generating events.
The most successful, despite being a diplomatically delicate undertaking, has been the Best of Manhattan Beach. Last year, in just its third year, the number of Best of Manhattan votes exceeded the number cast in last April’s city council election.
Under O’Callaghan’s reign, the chamber cancelled its popular Woman in Business conference and replaced it with the South Bay Leaders Summit and the Manhattan Beach Economic Forum.
“It really wasn’t my idea to cancel Women in Business. I had already gored too many sacred cows. It was the board’s idea,” O’Callaghan insisted during an interview last week.
The fourth new chamber event established during O’Callaghan’s four years is the Bite at the Beach, to be held this year on July 9 at the MBS Media Campus. That Saturday will be O’Callaghan’s final day in Manhattan Beach. He starts work Monday at the Huntington Beach Chamber of Commerce.
“Huntington offers more opportunity,” he said. “With 230,000 people, it’s six times the size of Manhattan Beach. It has grown out of being a small beach town. Now its residents are concerned about what it’s going to look like 20 years from now.”
Like Redondo Beach, he said, Huntington hopes to add more beachfront hotels and other resort related businesses. He noted that Simmzy’s restaurant, whose first location is two blocks up from the Manhattan Beach pier, recently opened a new location, two blocks south of the Huntington pier.
O’Callaghan said the biggest change he’s seen in Manhattan Beach since his arrival is the residents’ demand for higher-end downtown retailers.
“We’re seeing a continual upscaling of downtown businesses. Residents want what El Segundo Plaza has,” he said.
One of the highlights and also the biggest challenge of his time in Manhattan Beach, he said, has been the residents’ passion for their community.
“I’ve never worked with more involved and better informed residents,” O’Callaghan said.
But unlike the political controversies associated with the Hermosa Chamber’s endorsement of the June school bond measure and the Redondo chamber’s support for harbor revitalization, Manhattan’s chamber avoided political controversy.
The chamber board has not taken a position on the, council-imposed moratorium on business use changes in the downtown.
With characteristic diplomacy, O’Callaghan said the board did “encourage the city to take a breath before moving forward on the downtown.”
One positive outcome of the moratorium, he said, has been the formation of the Manhattan Beach Property Owners Association, headed by downtown property owner Tony Choueke.
“Previously, downtown property owners didn’t have a single voice. Now they are a player at the table,” he said.
Chamber board chairperson Martin Ensberg, vice president and manager of the Citizen’s Business Bank in Manhattan Beach, said of O’Callaghan, “Residents have always asked, ‘Just what does a chamber do?’ Jim’s done a good job of helping the chamber forge an identity by making it both community and business centric. It’s been a good four year run and we’re sorry to see him go. But I understand why he’d leave for a much bigger city.”
Ensberg said the chamber will appoint an interim president and CEO while undertaking a nationwide search for O’Callaghan’s replacement. ER
