Frank Heston, Riverview Bank Chair, Chamber In 2019 we were fortunate to spend time with volunteers throughout the Lehigh Valley. You can see in these photos that we partnered with folks in Easton to light trees in center square, and the borough of Hellertown added seating for passers-by along the main street. In the heart of the Christmas City, new pole wraps and holiday decorations adorn the entire downtown. This might just seem lucky, but it is because of our relationships, hard work and support from so many wonderful Chamber member businesses and individuals. Support from Air Products, Bennett Automotive, Blue Mountain Resort, Capital BlueCross, Concannon Miller, Easton Coach, QNB, Alvin H. Butz, First Commonwealth FCU, Lesavoy Butz Seitz, New Tripoli Bank, ViaMedia, Vision Accomplished, John Yurconic Agency, the Lehigh Valley Building Trades and many more. These great partners have contributed volunteers and real money to put into your community. They keep us moving forward each year supporting new ideas and projects to keep our business districts thriving and our neighborhoods looking inviting all year long.
Here’s wishing you a shiny and new 2020.
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Olga Negrón, HGSK Lawyers Chair, Hispanic Chamber Feliz Año Nuevo from your Hispanic Chamber familia! Starting a new year is a great opportunity to re-evaluate, re-purpose and get back on track. Each Chamber and Council started the fiscal year in July with a strategic planning session, taking a closer look at the work each group is doing to accomplish our mission. Starting a New Year falls in the middle of our fiscal, and I think it’s a perfect timing to keep us on track. The Hispanic Chamber worked diligently during our first half of our fiscal year to accomplish our goals. We partnered with PA Latino Convention, which host- ed over 800 Latino leaders from across the commonwealth uniting forces, energy and much power. We partnered with the Hispanic Center and helped them raised money to purchase turkeys for families in need and built new connections creating awareness of the valuable work the center does. We ended the year with our Holiday Fiesta Celebration in connection with the other business and diversity councils. THE POWER OF PARTNERSHIPS!
Considering the diversity that we have in the Lehigh Valley, it makes lots of sense that instead of looking at differences we become stronger when we build partnerships and learn from one another. The Chamber is a great conduit to strengthen our Lehigh Valley economic power if we encourage support- ing each other and working together. We are starting our New Year with another new partnership with the Community Action Development Corporation Bethlehem, who helps individuals start businesses across the Lehigh Valley. During the remaining of our fiscal year, we are planning more partnerships as we move around the Lehigh Valley showing individuals the great advantages of becoming members of the Chamber familia! Stay on track and continue looking at your strategic plan and Felíz Año Nuevo! Article written by Kim Capers Capital Blue Cross As successful business people we often step into the new year with a lot of energy, strategies and our calendars jam-packed with meetings, resolutions, events, projects and more! We have a clean slate with lofty goals to increase our production, tasks and self-worth.
However a healthy work, life balance is the key to our success! Overwork, and the accompanying stress and exhaustion can make you less productive, disorganized and emotionally depleted. It can also lead to all sorts of health problems, from anxiety and depression to insomnia and heart disease. Professional self-care habits like taking intermittent breaks, stepping out for lunch or taking a stroll around the block, setting professional boundaries, and healthy checkups, ensures that you stay sharp, motivated and healthy. Here are a few healthy tips that anyone can get into: 1. Go for a run or light jog 2. Meditate or deep breathing for five minutes 3. Take a break when needed 4. Choose who you spend time with. 5. Laugh heartily 6. Eat green daily 7. Avoid emotional eating 8. Start a journal 9. Learn to say no. 10. Stop overthinking 11.Get Annual Checkups that include blood pressure checks, biometrics and cholesterol screenings! 12. Talk to a health coach or personal trainer to maintain balance and standards in your life! Cheers! Article written by: Dr. Kamran Afshar Chamber Chief Economist, The Chamber's Finance Committee Cars are one of the biggest ticket items consumers purchases. And historically car sales have been highly correlated with the Consumer Sentiment Index and economic cycles in the US. With the exception of the large cities, public transportation in the rest of the country leaves a lot to be desired for. Outside the major cities, our transportation infrastructure is heavily dependent on private car ownership, making it more of a necessity.
17 million cars and light trucks were sold in the US in the 12 months end- ing in October 2019, a shade higher than its average level in the boom years of 2004-2006, however, close to half-a-million fewer sales com- pared to 2015-16 period. Car & light truck sales ran at around 16 to 17 million units annually be- fore the great recession. And while there are more cars being sold now, because our population has increased by more than 28 million since then, on the per capita basis we are still not back to the peak car buying period when the number of cars sold per year exceeded 6 per every 100 Americans. Now that number has dropped to 5. During the dark days of the Great Recession, car sales dropped by al- most 50%. We significantly reduced buying new cars and discovered to our surprise, that our old cars may not have been as obsolete as we thought! During the recession the cash-for- clunker program was introduced to prevent the demise of the US car industry. The sheer size of the buy back, not only stop the decline in car sales, but it spiked sales vol- ume sky high. The effectiveness of the program became obvious after it ended, when the car market not only didn’t drop back to where it was before the program, it grew rapidly, and in a year’s time car sales were 30% higher than before the program started. The cash-for- clunker program worked and pull back the car industry from the brink of disaster, which is exactly what the program was designed to do. Businesses always adjust their method of operation after each re- cession, when they have to do with a lot less, they learn new methods and the longer and the harder a re- cession the larger the changes after the recession. Buying cars historically was highly correlated with the Consumer Sentiment Index which is now higher than what it was be- fore the Great Recession. Despite of that it appears that consumers also learned from the long and hard re- cession, at least in their approach to buying cars. On a per capita basis, we are now buying 15% fewer cars than we did before the recession. Cars are one of the biggest ticket items consumers purchases. And historically car sales have been highly correlated with the Consumer Sentiment Index and economic cycles in the US. With the exception of the large cities, public transportation in the rest of the country leaves a lot to be desired for. Outside the major cities, our transportation infrastructure is heavily dependent on private car ownership, making it more of a necessity. 17 million cars and light trucks were sold in the US in the 12 months end- ing in October 2019, a shade higher than its average level in the boom years of 2004-2006, however, close to half-a-million fewer sales compared to 2015-16 period. Car & light truck sales ran at around 16 to 17 million units annually before the great recession. And while there are more cars being sold now, because our population has increased by more than 28 million since then, on the per capita basis we are still not back to the peak car buying period when the number of cars sold per year exceeded 6 per every 100 Americans. Now that number has dropped to 5. During the dark days of the Great Recession, car sales dropped by almost 50%. We significantly reduced buying new cars and discovered to our surprise, that our old cars may not have been as obsolete as we thought! During the recession the cash-for-clunker program was introduced to prevent the demise of the US car industry. The sheer size of the buy back, not only stop the decline in car sales, but it spiked sales volume sky high. The effectiveness of the program became obvious after it ended, when the car market not only didn’t drop back to where it was before the program, it grew rapidly, and in a year’s time car sales were 30% higher than before the program started. The cash-for-clunker program worked and pull back the car industry from the brink of disaster, which is exactly what the program was designed to do. Businesses always adjust their method of operation after each recession, when they have to do with a lot less, they learn new methods and the longer and the harder a recession the larger the changes after the recession. Buying cars historically was highly correlated with the Consumer Sentiment Index which is now higher than what it was before the Great Recession. Despite of that it appears that consumers also learned from the long and hard recession, at least in their approach to buying cars. On a per capita basis, we are now buying 15% fewer cars than we did before the recession. Article written by: Jennifer Glose A.J. and Sean Wiesner were born with technology and telecommunications in their blood.
The brothers, native to Catasauqua, were drawn to the industry by having a father who endured a long, successful career with the biggest telecommunications company at the time, and who also made sure there was a computer in the house since the 1980s. At five years old the Wiesner boys could already do basic coding on a TRS80 system and by 12 years old they were wiring telephones. As adults, the brothers continued their love for technology and went to work for their father when he opened his own telecommunications company, AT&D. And after nearly 15 years of hon- ing and cultivating their technician skills at AT&D, in 2011 the company dissolved and the siblings decided to join forces with their longtime friend and fellow technology guru, Mark Schlosser, to create T3 Technologies LLC, a fully integrated technology solutions provider. The Wiesner duo, along with Schloss- er, came up with the name T3 to denote themselves as the company’s founding three technicians, licensed electricians with 40 years of combined experience in communications. “I tell everyone that we are technicians cubed,” said A.J. Wiesner, 45. Today, the company has coined the catch phrase “tomorrow’s technology, today”, to follow the T3 theme. “We are an all-in-one technology services provider,” Wiesner continued. PERSISTANCE PAYS It was a Friday when A.J. Wiesner found himself without a job, after AT&D dis- solved. That weekend he and his brother and Schlosser sat together in A.J.’s home and made calls from the database of customers they had built while at AT&D. By that Monday the three men were forming T3 Technologies LLC, using A.J Wiesner’s laundry room as an office and his garage for storage. “I don’t remember sleeping for the first year,” said Sean Wiesner, 44. “It was exciting, chaotic and a flurry of activity.” This went on for nearly six years, until the company’s customer base grew big enough that an official space for T3 Technologies was imminent. And in 2018, T3 Technologies began operating out of its current 3,000 square-foot home on Nor Bath Boulevard in Northampton, which is double the space that the company was using previously. “It was time for us to move out and expand and grow,” A.J. Wiesner said. Today the company has 10 employees and nine company vehicles and is blazing a trail as the Lehigh Valley’s provider of choice for low voltage wiring, telephony services, video surveillance, building security and information technology services. “We have a lot of customers that are loyal to us,” said Joseph Facchiano, business partner relations for T3 Technologies. PERSONALIZED SERVICES According to both A.J. Wiesner and Facchiano, T3 Technologies serve a niche with small local banks and credit unions, as well as small health care practices of all kinds. T3 also works with smaller nonprofits that are in need of protecting their donor base.“I feel that we offer a personalized touch,” A.J. Wiesner said. “We hold their hand.” Services offered by T3 include end- point management, server management, network management, information security, disaster recovery, phone systems, structured cabling and video surveil- lance.T3’s customers are those that are big enough to have the need for information technology services but too small to hire an information technology company. “We are very customer-oriented,” said Stephanie Marx, office manager at T3 and the company’s first employee. “We really strive to make our customers 100 percent happy, no matter how big or small.” GIVING BACK A.J. Wiesner said he remembers when the Allentown Rescue Mission reached out in need for a lead sponsor for one of its biggest fundraisers. Wiesner jumped at the chance for T3 Technologies to help. “We like the work of the Allentown member helps. Rescue Mission and are proud to support “It provides an avenue for us to give them.” back to the community,” Facchiano said. According to Facchiano, T3 gives back to the community in various ways, A MESSAGE TO START-UPS including allowing its employees to give When asked to give advice to others back.wanting to start a business, and take- The company gives Facchiano time aways from their journey as entrepre- off to volunteer for Community Partners neurs, the Wiesner brothers were quick for Kids, to promote child cyber safety. to share. Facchiano appears on Life Lessons on “Don’t give up. Don’t surrender. Keep the sunrise edition of WFMZ Channel digging,” A.J. Wiesner said. “It might 69 News, on the first Monday of every seem hard, but it’s worth it.” month, to talk about how to keep chil- Sean Wiesner added to his brother’s dren safe while using the internet. comments. “We do a lot as a company,” he said. “Create a systems-based approach Facchiano serves on the boards of the for creating a business,” he said. “It is Northampton Area Chamber of Com- extremely important.” merce and the Greater Lehigh Valley One might think it to be hard to own a Chamber’s Veterans & Military Council. business with a sibling and a close friend, Tony Jimenez, a U.S. Army veteran, but A.J. Wiesner gave his thoughts on is Facchiano’s teammate in the business why it works. partner relations department for T3. “It’s fantastic!” he said. “I have two Jimenez and Facchiano can be found people that I can trust. At the end of the in the community at many networking day I have two people that have my back events where they continue to build rela- and that know that I have theirs.” tionships with potential clients. When Jimenez started at T3 he was an installer, which Facchiano says gives customers the best of both worlds. “Tony not only knows the features of the product, but he knows how we go about installing it,” Facchiano said. A LEVEL OF TRUST As a member of the Greater Lehigh Val- ley Chamber of Commerce, the benefits are endless for T3 Technologies, accord- ing to Facchiano. “We have a lot of access to a lot of good people and good customers,” he said.To coincide with the company’s ef- forts to pay it forward, being a chamber Every year T3 Technologies LLC holds a customer appreciation night at Coca Cola Park to join clients for a Lehigh Valley IronPigs baseball game. L to R with IronPigs mascot are T3 owners A.J. Wiesner, Sean Wiesner and Mark Schlosser. |
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