As he looks back to the year 2011, Charley Cohon admits he was asking himself what he was going to do with the rest of his professional life. “Call it a mid-life crisis or whatever you like,” he says, “but I was at a point where I had been a successful independent manufacturers’ representatives for more than 25 years. I was wondering if this is how I close out my career, or should I do something different? And, if it’s the latter, exactly what am I going to do?”

Something different obviously won out as Cohon has just marked his fifth year as President and CEO of MANA.

“Sometimes the itch of a mid-life crisis can be scratched with a fancy sports car or a boat, but I was looking for something different — an opportunity to give back to a profession that has given so much to me,” he explains. It was at that time that the position at MANA became available and Cohon took advantage of the timing. “The MANA position was exactly what I was looking for. It was the chance to serve as the public face for the rep industry and to be a full-time advocate for the outsourced system of selling.”

Two Jobs at Once

Being your own boss and being answerable only to yourself is one thing, heading an international association of entrepreneurs in a variety of industries is quite another, as Cohon quickly learned. His first challenge was to manage a transition period during which he continued as owner of his representative firm, and headed MANA, and worked through the process of selling his representative firm to a key employee. Just as so many agents before him, he took advantage of the services of one of MANA’s referral attorneys and began the process of selling his agency. “That was a couple-of-years-long process, but thankfully it worked out very well for me and my agency. Looking back, I’d say the new owner added new and fresh ideas to the agency, and it has gone on very well without me.”

Now with his time and efforts devoted entirely to MANA, Cohon admits there were some financial and membership challenges that had to be met. To address the former, he explains, “One of the first things we had to come to terms with was the fact we had no business managing two other representative associations that held annual conferences and required MANA to keep a conference planner and executive director on staff. We let PTRA and AIM/R know that we would honor our contracts with them, but when those contracts expired, they would be better served with other management organizations.”

But those challenges were more than counterbalanced when Cohon tallied up the resources ready to stand shoulder-to-shoulder to help MANA thrive. “MANA had a committed and supportive Board of Directors, talented and diligent staff, and a newly assembled Strategic Planning Committee, all of whom stood tall and let me know, ‘I’ve got your back, Charley.’ With that kind of support, MANA had to be unstoppable.”

The next step was freeing MANA from the costs of office space and moving to virtual offices. “We accomplished that move over the period of a year. In addition to being a sound financial move, the effort also freed-up association finances and staff time to concentrate strictly on member services and benefits.”

It was a good time to free up resources to enhance member benefits, Cohon explained. “MANA members, just like the members of any representative association, watch their budgets and how they spend their dues dollars carefully. Being careful to focus our resources on activities that improve our value proposition has been very important to our members and to MANA in today’s economy.”

Notable Accomplishments

If meeting the financial and value proposition challenges weren’t enough, Cohon goes on to note some of the additional accomplishments MANA has made in the past five years:

• MANA’s Web Presence

Describing the association’s presence on the Internet, Cohon notes that in the “Web environment of today, members expect to be able to log on, view their member profile, download things they want and need, and conduct their electronic engagement in the time and place of their choosing. With that as a given, MANA’s web presence basically hadn’t been updated in any meaningful manner for about 10 years. As a result, members were not able to easily conduct business with MANA online.

“That problem is compounded when you consider a member might want to log in late on a Saturday night to renew their membership or download information on how to create a rep agreement or locate steps to follow for effective succession planning. And, they may be making that effort from their desk top, tablet or phone. So our resources had to be upgraded, organized, and rebuilt so MANA can deliver the information they need via any device they might choose. That was a big job, but it’s been accomplished.”

• CRM

“The goal of any CRM program should be that we can anticipate and more than meet the needs of our membership,” explains Cohon. “MANA’s CRM program has been completely rewritten from the ground up. The previous program was hardly intuitive and something always seemed to be in the way of the members accessing the resources they needed. It just didn’t have features that allowed us to adequately serve our members. Our new system allows us to deliver member benefits seamlessly. Association members can access and manipulate their member profiles quickly and accurately.”

• Virtual Office

As previously mentioned, MANA staff members now work from virtual offices. According to Cohon, “To some degree we’re following the lead of many of our members who have taken the same step with their businesses. In addition, our phone system has been programmed so members can still call toll-free and contact any MANA staff member they need. If more than one member calls the same extension at the same time, their voice mail is transcribed into a roughly transcribed e-mail communicating who called, the subject matter and even includes a .wav file that will be sent to the staff member’s e-mail.” If anything,” notes Cohon, “service levels to members improved now that MANA staff has no commute time.”

• Serving Manufacturers

While MANA has been conducting Manufacturers Seminars (the next one will be scheduled for the fall, at a date and location to be announced), Cohon notes that tastes have changed and MANA now needs to offer both intensive in-person sessions and self-paced online education. “We partnered with past NEMRA CEO Hank Bergson to do the in-person sessions, and he’s definitely raised the bar for classroom and facilitated discussion training. For those who would rather get their content from our website on an article-by-article as-needed basis, we’ve curated our content so it’s easy to search and find the topic that’s on your mind right now.”

• Online Classified Ads

In the past when a manufacturer wanted to advertise for representatives, he or she would contact MANA headquarters, develop an ad and then 90 days later, the ad would appear in Agency Sales. That process has been drastically changed and now online ads ordered through www.MANAonline.org appear immediately on the association’s website and are user-editable for the entire time the ad runs. And for those who prefer print ads, we still offer classified ads in Agency Sales magazine.”

• Agency Sales Magazine

According to Cohon, MANA’s monthly magazine “remains the number-one, top-mentioned benefit of membership. I’m constantly complimented about the content, the coverage of trends in the profession, the layout and appearance of the articles. And even though MANA members can now read Agency Sales on their laptop, tablet, or smartphone, the print edition is so beautifully executed that I’d have to say that the greatest impediment to having Agency Sales magazine read online is the coffee-table-book quality of the printed magazine.”

• Activities, Travels and Business Schools

Cohon, who recently earned the Certified Association Executive (CAE) designation, notes that as his schedule allows, he’s been doing more outreach at trade shows, representative meetings and business school visits. “If there’s a trade show that has a target-rich environment for representatives or manufacturers who ought to be working with representatives, we will reach out and offer to provide educational content to promote the representative method of selling.”

On the business school front, Cohon has spoken at Columbia University and the Harvard Business School addressing audiences “who otherwise wouldn’t necessarily have the knowledge they should have concerning representatives as they embark on their professional careers.”

• MANA Benefits and Services

When he’s asked to enumerate some of the more popular benefits and services that the association provides its members, Cohon notes that “creating the benefits is only half the job, and the other half is communicating to members in a memorable way exactly what benefits are available to them.

“When a member reaches out to suggest a ‘new’ benefit MANA should offer and it turns out that the benefit they’re requesting is already in place, it underscores the need to further reinforce MANA’s ‘benefits of membership’ communications. For example, members have suggested that MANA offer a database of manufacturers that use independent manufacturers’ representatives and an online forum where representatives can share questions and network with fellow members, both of which are already in place. We’ll continue to broadcast benefits in Agency Sales, the iToolbox, and by e-mail, and I also suggest that members log into the member area of www.MANAonline.org. It’s remarkable how much is already there.”

Looking to the Future

As he looks to what has been accomplished during the course of the last five years, Cohon can’t help but point to the future of MANA. As he does so, he explains that “Our guiding philosophy for independent agents is to provide services that will make it easier for them to start a representative firm, to run a representative firm and to establish and maintain relationships with principals; and for manufacturers, to provide resources that make it easier to find, recruit, hire and manage relationships with representative firms. At the same time, we want to provide more exposure for independent agencies in front of manufacturers. We will strive to provide information for manufacturers that will cause them to ask, ‘Why would I ever want to have a direct sales force?’ ‘Why would I ever want to have house accounts?’ ‘Why would I allow commissions to be paid inaccurately or late?’

“As we continue to do our job better in serving agents and manufacturers, we want to do everything we can to enhance their relationships. It’s just as the adage says: ‘A rising tide lifts all boats.’ If we do our job better, everyone will benefit. That’s our goal.”

MANA welcomes your comments on this article. Write to us at [email protected].