Forward momentum

We’ve just closed the ASCA’s 2nd Annual Executive Summit and we still feel the energy from the event.

More than 100 of your peers gathered in St. Pete’s Beach, Fla., at the awesome Don Cesar Hotel for three days to discuss the issues in the professional snow and ice management industry. ASCA’s Executive Summit is a combination of high-end educational seminars, behind the scenes committee work and plenty of networking opportunities.

Attendees raved about the speakers, and educational programming, but I was most excited about the behind the scenes work we’ve done.

Behind the scenes, though, is where I was most pleased with our progress. Our committees were hard at work putting out 2013-2014 initiatives together and implementing an enhanced structure to ASCA.

At the committee level, we named co-chairs for each of the committees to help advance our initiatives even more quickly.

• Mike Jones, True North Outdoor, is leading our industry standards committee, which will focus on making sure we have the most credible industry standards, and monitoring our SN9001 Quality Management System.
• Teri Meredith, About Time Snow, and the government affairs committee are focused on implementing positive legislative change at both the federal and state levels. They’ve made good progress on those initiatives.
• Crystal Arlington, AGMG, and the membership committee came up with a strategy to continue to deliver our message.
• David J. Frank and our safety committee moved our safety initiatives forward and have an aggressive timeline in place.
• Matt Boelman, Perficut, and our education committee works to continue to enhance our ASCA-C educational programming.

Finally, reflecting back on the event, with all of the education and work that we accomplished, it is hard to believe how far we have come in a two short years.

Throughout the conference, it was nice to hear the attendees talking with each other about their ASCA involvement and how proud they are with the association’s success.

When I’m asked about this I readily admit that it’s the hundreds of people who have shared their knowledge, their time and their energy to help better this industry through ASCA who deserve all of the credit. It’s these folks who’ve made the ASCA the dynamic and proactive group that it is today.

The author is executive director of ASCA.