I read a great book earlier this year—The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and I see that there are any number of points in the life of any organization when things can “tip” toward a change. I believe MCAA is poised at a tipping point for a lot of reasons. First just look at our staff, for many years it was just Teresa Sebring and myself and maybe a part-time Administrative Assistant to help with accounting or data entry. We made that position full time when we hired Christine Cottingham two years ago. With the growth of our fee-based programs, we needed someone to manage those processes so we promoted Christine to Revenue Services Administrator and hired Jennifer Knight as our Administrative Assistant. Jen handles all the accounting and all the data entry for the various bookings and benchmarking programs of MCAA. Mike Robertson, who had helped us develop the Sales Training program for Inside, Field and Sales Managers, accepted my offer to join the team full time as Membership Development Manager and Mike is knee deep in conversations with a LOT of companies who are interested in exploring membership in the Association.
And membership is another tipping point. We’ve hovered around 120 companies for a number of years now. With Mike’s efforts, we have a bunch of new names on the list … based on a very fast start for our Members Getting Members recruitment program. Just since January … Brooks Instruments, Flowmaster, K-Patents, Talon Technical Sales, Thuemling Instrument Co. and VorTek Instruments.
And another tipping point—increasing the involvement of all member companies in our programs. We are working with every one of these new companies to bring them up to speed as quickly as possible because we realize that there really are a lot of different programs that companies can take advantage of in the Association. So we developed an online presentation—it takes about 30 minutes—to review all of the programs of the Association. It gives me a chance to talk about what I think these programs can mean to a member company and to show some examples. I also have time to show how you access the website—and this new website is really great! Much easier to move around in than the old one.O
Our goal for growth this year is 40 new member companies which is VERY aggressive. But with six new companies in six weeks, we are well on our way!
