CEO Summit: A Story of Trust, Transparency, and Change

The promotional products industry has traditionally been a very carefully guarded business. Distributors, worried about competition, once made winning a zero-sum game. 

But at commonsku, if there’s one legacy of change we hope to continue to bring about, it’s the spirit of community over competition through collaboration. 

This past week, we continued that mission by hosting around 20 top executives at our second CEO Summit, held in the beautiful Bisha Hotel in downtown Toronto (here’s a glimpse at our first CEO Summit). 

The CEO Summit included a full day of topic-by-topic, peer-led conversations and two community dinners. Prior to our gathering, we surveyed attendees to ask about the most pressing challenges they face today. We also asked for a detailed analysis of their business, including sales growth, margins, compensation, team infrastructure, and more. Using these survey results as a springboard for our conversations, we hosted three open panel discussions. Open Panel Discussions are not your typical panel; they are a group-think involving the entire room, but the conversation is initiated by an interview with a panel of peers, which then opens to the floor. Here’s a snapshot of the topics everyone in the room agreed were the most challenging:

It’s rare to have so much amazing industry talent and experience in one room and in such an intimate setting. When the combination of expertise, openness, and a heavy dose of vulnerability permeates the atmosphere, something magical happens. We learned four vital lessons as we facilitated a conversation with our customers and friends: 

1. Scaling is crucial. Businesses are in a complex state of flux due to client demands, an increase in services, and a growing and diverse team. The tenuous tightrope of sales growth and profitability is a raw reality, and scaling a business in a way that leads to specialization of roles and developing in-house expertise is a priority for everyone.
   
   

2. Compensation challenges vex most, if not all. Whether it’s bridging a legacy compensation structure with a new bonus model or driving sales growth through incentives, virtually everyone in the room was experimenting with some version of creative compensation change (if you’d like more ideas on compensation change, check out our ebook, “The New Compensation Guide for Today’s Modern Distributor”).
   
   

3. The changing client: Whether it involves shops, kitting, graphic design, or product trends, the pressing challenges by today’s modern distributors are due to an increasingly sophisticated buyer, requiring distributors to reengineer their teams to support a wide variety of client types and needs.
   
   

4. The growing leader: Most leaders in a distributorship spend an inordinate amount of their time and energy in triage, helping teams or colleagues solve emergency problems or immediate complex challenges. Many leaders shared how they want to rise above the chaos by providing more educated infrastructure throughout their team and by investing in a specialization of roles, middle-management, and team leadership.

Prior to our peer-led panel discussions, the event kicked off with Aaron Kucherawy (commonsku’s VP of Customer Success) sharing “How Leaders Make the Most of commonsku,” walking through the most vital parts of the commonsku platform that are crucial for leaders to help create benchmarks and evaluate their company’s health and progress.

Charlie Moscoe (commonsku’s Vice President of Product Development) demonstrated how we prioritize client-led platform development, sharing the current and future roadmap, and held an open chat on changes desired and opportunities we can create through technology.

Dave Shultz talked about “Strengthening Supplier Partnerships,” sharing our vision behind the three levels of commonsku suppliers (connected+, connected, and community+) and our goal to create a win-win by with greater efficiency, scalable growth, and more profit for both distributor customers and suppliers.

Our day’s discussions ended with Mark and Catherine Graham holding an open discussion on the future of the platform, their insights into the incredible future our industry faces, and the unique opportunities we can create together.

One attendee wrote, “I walked away from our time together with a new pep in my step and the courage to use commonsku in even more new and exciting ways. This was a truly inspiring event, and I could not be more thankful and fulfilled in my trip to Toronto.”

Another participant wrote, “In all the years of attending events and meeting industry people, these last few days with each of you are at the top of my list.”

When we first thought of the idea of a CEO Summit, we imagined a small, intimate gathering of customers hosted through a peer-led, open-book style sharing experience, but we weren’t sure what to expect. We knew we wanted to lean into our passion for bringing smart people together in a way that facilitates learning, encourages growth, and inspires change.

What we didn’t expect was that CEO Summit was just the beginning of a transformative experience. Today, each group of CEOs continue the conversations sparked in Toronto, sharing best practices through a new community (formed first at CEO Summit), and now an ongoing dialogue meant to inspire one another, share practices, encourage growth, and ignite change. 

A huge thank you to everyone who joined us for CEO Summit in such a spirit of transparency and trust. It’s because of you that we get to serve the best people on the planet through the most powerful order management platform in the industry.