President's Message: The Value of One Good Idea

As we start this new year, I want you to consider how much a good idea is worth to you. How much would you pay to purchase a solution that immediately increases your production capacity by five percent or removes a troubling barrier in your market and opens up additional sales opportunities?

Every day, you are asked to solve problems. Whether it’s trying to increase production with existing resources to meet growing demand, address the changing needs of your customers, or accommodate the varying costs associated with your raw materials and transportation logistics, it’s never ending and its always a challenge. You can try to come up with all the answers yourself, but why would you want to? Especially when there is a large, national organization made up of your peers that are eager to share their lessons learned and industry best practices based on years of experience.

SBCA is a lot of things. In the largest sense, it’s a group of component manufacturers (CMs) and suppliers that gives our industry a voice on everything from codes and standards to regulations and market trends. It also provides support to CMs on workforce issues and plant safety and helps develop industry risk management and best practice tools like jobsite packages, quality programs, and SBCRI research. These are the types of things none of us could do well on our own, so we band together and provide strength through numbers.

SBCA is also a facilitator. By hosting the BCMC show, Open Quarterly Meetings (see page 6) and regional meetings, as well as collaborating with state chapters, SBCA brings CMs and their suppliers together in a focused way we just wouldn’t be able to do alone.

It’s when we are together that the real value of the association is realized. We learn a lot during meetings and educational sessions, and we learn even more when we get together during and after dinner to talk through industry initiatives and challenges in the marketplace. So many good topics emerge from those unstructured conversations. Topics that help you think about your business in a new way. You gain a perspective you likely wouldn’t have had without hearing the challenges and perspectives from other parts of the country.

I’ve heard many of those challenges and perspectives throughout my years of participation in SBCA activities. I think most of them are truly invaluable because they’ve provided me with a point of view I could never have achieved through just my own experiences.

How much is a new idea worth? If you’re doing less than $5 million in annual sales, your membership to SBCA is less than a thousand dollars. The cost of membership likely won’t affect your bottom line, but having access to all the ideas SBCA helps generate will.

You can’t really know or appreciate what you haven’t seen or experienced. If you’ve been on the fence on whether to join, I’d love to talk with you further (president@sbcindustry.com). It’s a decision I’ve never regretted and I promise you won’t either.

Gregg Griggs, SBCA President