Even though summer doesn’t technically start until June 21, I, like many of you, count all of June and sometimes May in this season. And by that measure, HARDI has had a busy summer so far.
Cooling season is starting to heat up, baseball season is in full swing, and I don’t have another pun off the top of my head. But, I tell you what, I could not be prouder of the direction of our industry and HARDI so far this year.
Shortly after assuming the HARDI presidency in December, I sent copies of the book “The Ideal Team Player” by Patrick Lencioni to all of HARDI’s staff members at the organization’s headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. I had asked everyone on the team to read the book before I visited the HARDI office in early February for the new board member orientation and meeting.
Last year, HARDI hit new milestones across the board. We saw record-breaking attendance at the annual Congressional Fly-in, Marketing & Sales Focus Conference, and, of course, the biggest HARDI event ever in the Annual Conference: NOVA 2017. These are fantastic indicators of the growing engagement by HARDI members with the organization, the valuable resources available to them, and their peers in the industry. I am proud to take the helm at HARDI and lead us on this continued trajectory of growth toward new heights in 2018.
With the 2017 summer season in the books, distributor management teams now focus on the execution of the winter logistics and sales plan, while studying the outlook for next year. While weather always provides the potential to adjust our sales, there is no doubt that when utilizing good data, effectively trained and supported management teams can design and execute better strategies to reach their goals.
The middle of summer brings opportunities for all. Your business strategies and systems are tested under the full load of the high demand of the cooling season, and so are the people. Our industry’s incredible people deserve hearty congratulations for providing an information, application and logistical system that plays an important part in delivering comfort to hundreds of millions of Americans every summer.
The arrival of summer's heat brings all of our business activity into high gear, as the months of learning, studying, planning and improvement evolve into pure execution for the busy months. Our industry continues to evolve and grow, and your association leads the way in so many crucial ways to ready our teams for this critical harvest period.
Summer is here for much of the country, and the northern reaches will be there soon. Our industry’s peak demand period brings a host of opportunities as well as challenges. How well we actively manage these often determines our performance in all of those Key Performance Indicators for the year. HARDI members are able to see how they are doing by routinely comparing their performance to the industry as a whole with HARDI’s Benchmarking Pillar.
Spring is here, and I’m going to share my spring calendar with you. Not because it’s particularly interesting or that you should care what I’m up to, but because I hope it may serve as a template for you as you plan your team’s involvement in spring HARDI activities (and, if you’re like me, you like to book all your travel at once when sales are on to get the most bang for the buck).
With the HARDI Annual Conference behind us and last year’s business in the books, it’s time to take our organizations to new heights this year. Our businesses today are complex customer service platforms that face constant pressure to innovate and excel in service delivery.
