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CM Magazine Cover
From the Winter 2019 Issue

Volunteers Taking Care of Business

Technology to Manage Business and Life

Message from the Executive Director || Paul MacDonald

Vol·un·teer·ism: The practice of doing work for good causes, without being paid for it

On a cold weekend in November, I witnessed volunteerism in action. Locked away in a local hotel meeting room, the board of directors and staff of ACMO spent two solid days working with a strategic planning facilitator to hammer out a new strategy and path for ACMO in the coming years. Yes, everyone in the room was technically a trained ‘professional’, but they were volunteering by virtue of giving freely of their time to improve and advance a very good cause: condominium management.

Improving the quality of condominium management is at the core of ACMO’s vision and mission, and it’s also the underlying reason behind the recent introduction of government regulation and licensing for the condominium industry. The new regulatory regime, while positive and much needed, is still in its infancy and evolving, particularly in the area of condominium management education. It remains to be seen how this will play out and what role ACMO will play in it.

Condominium education has been ACMO’s stock-in-trade for over 40 years and is the primary reason members join, so it’s no surprise we felt compelled to hold a strategic planning session in the wake of these seismic changes. They say that “hope is not a strategy” and that “by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”, so it was imperative that ACMO critically re-examine our role within the industry and think strategically about how we can ensure our ongoing relevance in the long term.

So, where are we going? What challenges and opportunities must we address? What will we focus on? How will we deliver value and stay relevant? We explored these questions and many more during our planning session, but a consensus formed to focus on four key strategic areas over the next three years:

Membership Growth: To deliver better membership value, increase member satisfaction and expand and diversify our professional community.

Educational Leadership: To be perceived as the premier educator of condominium managers by improving, expanding and diversifying our educational programs and resources.

Brand Awareness: To raise the awareness and profile of ACMO and our professional community as the trusted resource of choice for condominium expertise and excellence.

Organizational Excellence: To build an effective, efficient and sustainable organization for the future that meets the needs of our professional community.

Skeptics might take the jaded view that these objectives are moot in the wake of government regulation, however, they would be wrong. Industry regulators don’t build supportive learning communities,  industry associations do. The volunteers that purposefully crafted these objectives are extremely committed and enthusiastic about building a  strong and vibrant community of condominium management professionals led by ACMO. The tagline “Elevating Condominium Management” captures what we are trying to do. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be working together to finalize our detailed plans and, as the BTO hit exclaims, making sure we’re “Taking Care of Business”.


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