88%

June 1, 2018

Every January, your board of directors and AICC staff meet over a three-day period—our Winter Board Meeting (WBM)—to discuss the current health of your Association and to update our long-term plan. Based on the results, the various AICC committees then meet to determine how to best implement the board’s plan.

To prepare for the WBM, your board receives details on financial health, as well as committee updates and marketing data. In this year’s board book were two sentences by Virginia Humphrey, our great director of membership and marketing:

“71 percent of AICC general members have seen a 45 percent growth in sales since 2010. By comparison, industry statistics for the same period show an 18 percent growth in sales for the entire industry.”

That data was vital to this year’s WBM. As we went around the room and compared our own growth rates, we could see that the engaged members were the companies who had higher growth. Based on this clarity, the board updated our mission/vision statement to: When you invest and engage, AICC will deliver success.

Over the next year, you will see AICC providing you with more success stories of how members took advantage of the many programs and educational offerings that have helped our individual organizations succeed in the marketplace.

Since I joined AICC in 2011, we have experienced an 88 percent increase in sales. The seven years prior, our company experienced only a 17 percent increase in sales.

How did we make this happen? We were an engaged member:

We attended the national meetings. www.aiccbox.org/page/meetings
We signed our young leaders up for AICC’s Emerging Leaders program. www.aiccbox.org/page/leader
We participated in AICC educational courses, such as those that covered corrugated and folding carton fundamentals. www.aiccbox.org/page/education
We engaged our entire company’s workforce and all new hires to take the free online safety basics course. www.aiccbox.org/page/packagingschool

If you want your company to succeed and grow, the answer is to engage and participate in AICC, whose main goal is to ensure your success. Or we will give you your money back. That part of the story is coming soon.