2025 is almost in the books. In many ways, this has been one of the best years for the Chamber. Your participation in the Chamber has been epic.

Attendance at mixers, luncheons, business universities, community events, and more is reaching capacity almost every time. We want to thank you for your support in making this a wonderful year!

Earlier this year, our staff spent a good amount of time reflecting on ways we can improve the organization, our decision making, and what we can do really well. From those discussions, we developed guiding principles to help us better serve you and this community.

First, we determined what we are deeply passionate about—that thing that drives us everyday to do our best work. We are deeply passionate about building connections that help us explore, understand, and improve the Heber Valley. This community continues to evolve, and we want to always be in a state of curiosity to understand more about the values, the people, and the resources that make this community amazing.

Next, we are small but mighty staff. We wanted to determine what we could be the best at. We homed in on building the Heber Valley destination experience as it aligns with our community, culture, and heritage. There is growth that harms and there is growth that celebrates our community, culture and heritage. We are fiercely committed to the latter. We are focused on projects that are resident-centric and will help us maintain our core values as a community.

Finally, we wanted to understand what fuels our economic engine. It’s increasing per person spending in the Heber Valley. To us, this means encouraging our locals to support local stores and businesses before looking out of the valley. Shift some of what you were already going to spend outside our community back into our community. Heber Valley’s visitor economy is strong, but we want to encourage our guests to add one more thing to their stay. Buy that gift. Stay one more day. Have one more meal. Or do
one more activity. As we promote local businesses to our visitors and residents the benefit will be amazing.

For the savvy-eyed readers, if this sounds like the Hedgehog concept from the book Good to Great, you’re correct. We needed to give ourselves a strong rubric to measure our decisions against. By staying focused on these principles, we will have greater success at meeting our mission to drive economic development by promoting tourism, connecting our local businesses, and uniting our community.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! We hope to see you all in 2026.