Charles Cohon, MANA’s president and CEO since 2011, retires at the end of June. As someone who works at MANA, I want to say that those who hired him in 2011 made an outstanding and excellent choice. Thanks to his leadership skills, the MANA of today differs significantly in a positive way from when he took over.

Charles Cohon speaking at the
Harvard Business School in October 2015.

During his tenure, he created a long-term strategic plan with the help of a strategic planning committee. We retained Mary Byers, coauthor of Race for Relevance, to help in this process, and the implementation of the plan resulted in a significant improvement to MANA’s operation and status.

He is the one who produced the idea of a RepFinder® phone app that improves the ability of our manufacturer members to find and connect with manufacturers› representative members, a win for both. He also made changes to the RepFinder® directory that improved results. He also introduced our online ads that provide advertisers a lot more space to describe what they do and what they are looking for than the Agency Sales magazine ads.

He created strategic partnership relationships with industry-specific manufacturers’ representative associations that provide their members with a MANA membership, increasing the number of our manufacturers’ representative members. He also initiated a monthly dues program to encourage more start-ups to join MANA.

Prior to Charley becoming MANA’s President and CEO, MANA had purchased an office building that was significantly impacting MANA’s finances negatively. Charley sold the office building and in 2013 terminated MANA’s lease for office space. This immediately improved our finances, allowing MANA to provide more member resources.

He used Infusionsoft (now Keap), a technology that vastly improved how MANA communicates with members and prospects. Those interested in learning about what MANA can do for them simply provide their contact information and they get an email with a “test search” link that gives them an estimate of how many MANA members they can contact if they join as well as the educational resources we include with the membership. The software follows up with prospects by sending them periodic “Rep MBAs,” short but educational emails.

MANA now ranks extremely higher in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), so we do get many inquiries from prospects.

He added the “Wisdom Council,” a group of long-term MANA members who offer to mentor other less experienced members.

On the MANA home page, we now provide a link to testimonials from MANA members on how MANA helped them, another Charley contribution.

And, of course, there was the COVID-19 crisis. MANA provided resources such as MANAcast and MANAchats that helped members adapt and continue to adapt to deal with the changes this virus brought on us. Members tell us they are having their “best years ever!” During the beginning of the crisis, when things were at their worst, Charley quietly extended memberships that lapsed for six months. This allowed those members to recover and renew the next time their memberships were about to lapse.

Charley, we cannot thank you enough for what you did for MANA. Without you and the actions you took, MANA might not even still be in existence. On behalf of the entire MANA family, we are eternally grateful for all that you did and wish you a wonderful retirement. We will miss you!