ASSOCIATE DIVISION DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE

By Paul Yager, AASP-MN Associate Division Director

Use Your Network

Over the past 30 days, I’ve been able to attend two different leadership retreats. One of the retreats was with the AASP-MN Board and the other was with Enterprise’s leadership team in Wisconsin. As with many retreats and conferences, these meetings offered opportunities to share best practices, learn new strategies, socialize and build your network.

I’ve attended many conferences over the past 17 years with Enterprise, but these two most recent retreats felt different for many reasons. They were the first ones I’ve attended since Covid, so being able to interact with leadership in person was refreshing. It was also very evident that everyone was facing challenges when it comes to their business, but it didn’t discourage positive conversation. What I took away from these conferences was impactful.

The most common question I face being an associate member in AASP-MN is about our fleet. More specifically, do we have enough? While obviously very complicated, the short answer is that this is something we’ve never seen before and we’ve had to change the way we acquire vehicles and preserve our fleet longer than ever. Every person or business has a similar story of how they were able to overcome the challenges of the past few years and the issues they continue to face. At these retreats, I learned that while many of our challenges were similar, how each organization worked through the challenges was completely different. Spending in-depth time discussing the specific problems like staffing/employee development, account/customer relationships and profitability can generate information and best practices that can be applied in many ways to each business.

Thinking outside the box and not being tied to how things have always been done in the past is more necessary now than ever. Learning from my peers and leaders in the industry was priceless and I’ve already been able to use the information from those retreats. The ability to be part of a network like the Alliance to expand my business acumen, mentorship and to help grow the industry are a few of the many benefits of membership. Challenges won’t stop in the future, but overcoming them is easier when you know how to use your network and can rest assured that you aren’t trying to do it all by yourself.