The Year She Almost Quit: Cindy Williams on Rebuilding the Cartersville-Bartow Chamber

Cindy Williams walked into this conversation with Logan Lewis carrying the polish you'd expect from the CEO of a 975-plus-member chamber of commerce, and she left having said things she admitted she'd never said out loud on a public platform before. She's led the Cartersville-Bartow Chamber of Commerce for a decade now, guiding workforce programs like Project Purpose and second-chance hiring, and holding a resume stacked with a Georgia Certified Chamber Executive credential, Leadership Georgia, and an MBA from Auburn. None of that came up first, though. What came up first was Blue Ridge, two older brothers, and a girl who declared a marketing major because she liked looking at billboards.

A Basketball Player From Blue Ridge Who Backed Into Marketing

Cindy grew up the youngest of three in Blue Ridge, Georgia, the daughter of a Georgia State Patrol officer who later ran his own lawn care business. "We were a sports family," she said, basketball her game, her two older brothers pulling her competitive streak out of her early. When it came time to declare a major at Piedmont College, she didn't have a plan. "I thought, you know, billboards are really cool. I like looking at billboards. So I'm just going to go marketing. That was a legitimate thought for me." An MBA at Auburn followed, along with an awkward, funny stretch of living with her athletic-trainer brother, whose revolving door of friends collided with her need to study. From there, marketing background in hand, she landed her first chamber job in Blairsville and Union County, where she stayed nine and a half years before Cartersville came calling.

The Year She Almost Quit

This is the part of the conversation Logan had to coax out. Cindy came to Cartersville confident in what chambers do, but not in whether she could do this chamber. "Your power is in the knowledge of your community and those relationships with businesses," she said, "and when you're new to a community, you don't have that." Coming from a town where she could answer any question, she suddenly couldn't. "I say the wrong names of things because I haven't learned all of that... it just felt like I felt like a failure." She described going home some nights and crying. "What have I done? I'm just not good at this anymore." She questioned, seriously, whether chamber work was still in the cards for her. Her advice now to anyone in that spot: give it a full year, because the work is cyclical, and only after a full calendar of events do the relationships and the confidence catch up. By year two, she said, "I was crazy. I really do love this. I really was made for this."

Building a Life From Scratch, an Hour and a Half From Home

The professional adjustment was only half of it. Cindy moved to Cartersville alone, a single woman without the built-in safety net she'd had in Blairsville, where her father was fifteen minutes away if anything went wrong. "That's not necessarily the case when you're an hour and a half away," she said. She leaned on the one advantage chamber work gives you: forced, constant exposure to new people. She named the friendships that got her through it, starting with Leslie McMillan at a welcome reception, Ellen Browning, who "took her under her wing" after inviting her to a Super Bowl party weeks into the job, and Jesse Weaver, now one of her closest friends. It's also where the conversation turned most personal, with Cindy tracing her perfectionism to working summers for her exacting father and to her CliftonStrengths result, "Woo," the drive to win people over. "I genuinely want people to like me," she said, adding it's healthier now to "celebrate the good" instead of fixating on the two percent that isn't.

What the Chamber Is Actually For

Logan, newly full-time in his own small business, pressed Cindy on the skeptics: people who've been to the free events and still don't think chamber membership is worth the money. Her answer wasn't a hard sell. "It may not be for everybody," she said. "There are plenty of stories out there to prove otherwise." But she laid out what membership actually buys beyond ribbon cuttings: a searchable directory, a jobs board, peer databases for benchmarking against other local businesses, and access she calls "almost like a secret menu" of connections that happen because two members ended up in the same room. She also fielded Logan's question about everyday residents using the chamber's free directory to find a plumber or an HVAC company. Beyond services, she talked at length about the chamber's growing push into business-to-education partnerships, from classroom career talks to formal work-based learning programs, aimed at closing the gap employers are seeing in workforce-ready graduates.

Why the Logo Finally Had to Change

The chamber's rebrand, unveiled after a full year of research, didn't start in a boardroom. It started in an employee review, when a staffer told Cindy point-blank that the old look, in place for about a decade, no longer matched the community or its rising business leaders. "It took like two seconds of looking," Cindy said. "You're absolutely right. It's time." The old mark, by her own description, read as government-issued, closer to a courthouse seal than a modern chamber. The new one leans on color psychology: green for growth and vivaciousness, blue for trust, and a mosaic pattern carried forward from the old brand to represent the county's mix of industries and people. "It's less governmental," she said. "The membership is very much responding to this as well."

Listen to the Full Conversation

There's plenty more in the full episode, from Cindy's take on whether she'd ever run for local office to a candid riff with Logan about the ups and downs of building a small business network in Cartersville from the ground up. Catch the complete conversation with Cindy Williams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, and follow Your Morning Drive for a new episode every Wednesday.